THE SUNDAY TELEGRAPH: The case of L'Oréal heiress, Liliane Bettencourt, has enraptured France and forced Nicolas Sarkozy into the spotlight.
Before becoming a scandal about money, politics, art, history, café society and power, the Affaire Bettencourt, now threatening the Sarkozy presidency, is the story of two ferociously ambitious young Hungarian outsiders and their success at storming the citadels of the French establishment.
One, Nicolas Sarkozy, the son of a womanising émigré aristocrat and a doctor's daughter, used to be told by his (twice) remarried father on visiting Sundays that he would never amount to anything much in France, because of his foreign name, small stature and below-average school grades.
The other, François-Marie Banier, né Banyiaï, was regularly beaten by his Renault migrant worker turned ad-man father for being a dilettante, an aesthete, and a high-school drop-out. (By coincidence Pál Sarkozy, Nicolas's father, also dabbled in advertising for a while).
Mr Sarkozy has mentioned the slights he suffered as the least well-off boy of his chic school in Neuilly, Paris's richest suburb. Mr Banier neglected even to complete his baccalauréat, haunting luxury hotel lobbies from his teens on, becoming in rapid succession the favourite of such luminaries as the painter Salvador Dali, the Nobel-prize playwright Samuel Beckett, and the couturiers Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Cardin. The Communist poet Louis Aragon enthused about the first novel Mr Banier published, aged 22.
Mr Sarkozy came to the attention of Charles Pasqua, the Gaullist party stalwart and key power-breaker [sic] who was to help shape most of his career, with his first public speech at a national rally: he was just 20 at the time.
Today Nicolas Sarkozy is president of the French Republic, while François-Marie Banier, a polymath photographer, painter and novelist, has recently been ranked 917th richest individual in the world, having accepted fabulous gifts from a string of wealthy old ladies, ranging from the viscountess Marie-Laure de Noailles to the actress Silvana Mangano - and especially from his latest patron, Liliane Bettencourt, the 87-year-old L'Oréal heiress.
The two men, no longer so young (Mr Banier is 63, Mr Sarkozy 55) nor as pretty as they both once were, stand at each end of a glittering chain of achievements, events, relationships, networks and rivalries now threatening to engulf France in the kind of political meltdown not seen here since the 1930s. >>> Anne-Elisabeth Moutet in Paris | Sunday, July 11, 2010
Les personnes clés de L’affaire Bettencourt >>>
Related articles here and here
LOS ANGELES TIMES: The daughter of France's richest woman says a charmer swindled her frail mother out of $1.25 billion in gifts. The family squabble has grown to include the courts and President Sarkozy.
Reporting from Paris — In a chic Paris suburb, inside the luxury villa of France's richest woman, nobody much cared what the butler saw.
When L'Oreal [sic] heiress Liliane Bettencourt met her advisors or lawyers to discuss secret Swiss bank accounts or lavish gifts to a male friend, the butler would simply bring in refreshments, then leave.
But what the butler heard, thanks to a cheap tape recorder smuggled in with the bone china teacups and silver spoons, has proved an explosive twist to a high-profile battle for the Bettencourt billions.
This month, celebrity photographer Francois-Marie Banier, a 63-year-old socialite dandy, went on trial, accused of tricking Bettencourt, 87, out of art masterpieces, cash and insurance policies worth $1.25 billion.
FOR THE RECORD: This article states that the Bettencourt fortune is $28 billion. The heiress' fortune is listed at $18 billion.Bettencourt's estranged daughter, Francoise Meyers-Bettencourt, is alleging in a civil lawsuit that he exploited her aging mother's frailty.
The case started out as a run-of-the-mill family dispute among Bettencourt, her only child and Banier over who gets what. It has become a political scandal embroiling government ministers and even President Nicolas Sarkozy. >>> Kim Willsher, Los Angeles Times | Sunday, July 11, 2010
