THE TELEGRAPH: Liliane Bettencourt, the L'Oréal heiress, has said she is "pained and vexed" at her daughter's behaviour amid a legal battle that has set off a financial investigation drawing in the highest levels of French government.
Mrs Bettencourt, France's richest woman, was attacking a renewed bid by her daughter, Françoise Bettencourt-Meyers, to have a judge declare her incompetent to manage her own affairs.
Her daughter has alleged that her 87-year-old mother is subject to the undue influence of photographer Francois-Marie Banier, to whom she has given gifts worth nearly a billion euros.
"I am at once pained and vexed for I say to myself how, after so many years, someone who has lived close to me has such petty reactions at that," Mrs Bettencourt told France 3 television.
Her daughter first tried to have her declared incompetent in December 2009. The judge refused in the absence of a medical expertise, something to which Bettencourt has so refused to submit. >>> | Wednesday, July 14, 2010
THE INDEPENDENT: Sarkozy's summer of scandal: He came to power as a new kind of politician. Now the French President is beset by old-fashioned troubles. Can he survive? – Between the wooded parkland of the Bois de Boulogne and the first lazy bend of the river Seine, just to the west of Paris, there is an "island" of millionaires. The leafy, silent streets of mansions and mansion flats are divided from the city by the Bois; they are separated from the towering La Défense office district by the river; and they are cut off from the bulk of Neuilly-sur-Seine, the richest town in France, by an eight-lane, urban motorway called the Avenue Charles de Gaulle. >>> John Lichfield | Wednesday, July 14, 2010
