French businessman Bernard Tapie dies at 78

He was a scandal-ridden football club owner, actor, politician, newspaper mogul and former owner of Adidas: The glamorous French businessman Bernard Tapie is dead. He died on Sunday morning at the age of 78 of cancer, as his family announced to the newspaper «La Provence».

Tapie had suffered from cancer for years. His condition had deteriorated significantly in the past few months. The editor-in-chief of the newspaper “La Provence”, Guilhem Ricavy, told the AFP news agency that Tapie, the publisher’s majority owner, “fell into a coma during the night”. One of his sons confirmed the death on Instagram with a short message: “Goodbye, my phoenix”.

According to the family, Tapie died “peacefully” in his house in Paris, “surrounded by his wife, children, grandchildren and brother ». The funeral should take place in his «heart city» Marseille in southern France.

Controversial manager and ex-politician

Tapie was a highly controversial manager and ex-politician in France. He started out as a simple television salesman and built a real corporate empire in the 1970s and 1980s by buying and selling troubled businesses. The longtime head of the football club Olympique Marseille, which he bought in 1986, also made a political career, became a member of parliament and under the socialist President François Mitterrand in the 1990s, city planning minister for a short time.

A scandal about a football game bought in 1993 brought Tapie to prison. Because of the bribe affair he was sentenced to eight months in prison at the end of 1995, the club was stripped of a championship and he had to go to the second division. At Olympique, however, Tapie had a lot of support from the fans who called him “Boss” until the very end.

Years of legal dispute over Adidas Sale

He was also known as a former Adidas owner. The sale of its shares in the German sporting goods manufacturer in the early 1990s kept the courts busy for years.

Tapie had bought the shares in 1990 and sold them in 1993 to the then state-owned bank Crédit Lyonnais. When the company resold the shares at a large profit, the businessman, who was in private bankruptcy at the time, felt cheated and went to court. In 2008, a private arbitration tribunal awarded him a good 400 million euros in damages from the state.

However, the judgment caused a political scandal. The suspicion arose that the then Minister of Economic Affairs and today’s head of the European Central Bank (ECB), Christine Lagarde, had not appealed on behalf of the then Conservative President Nicolas Sarkozy. Tapie had supported Sarkozy before his election victory in 2007.

Lagarde was found guilty in 2016 of aiding and abetting embezzlement of state funds, but went unpunished. The legal processing of the affair continues.

Good relationships until the end

Tapie still had good connections in politics until the end. Prime Minister Jean Castex praised him as a “fighter” and a “very committed man”. And President Emmanuel Macron praised Tapie as a “source of inspiration for generations of French.”

“This man who had a fighting spirit, who could move mountains and reach for the moon, never gave up and fought against cancer to the end, ”said a statement from the Elysée Palace. Macron paid tribute to Tapies “ambition, energy and enthusiasm”.