The French tycoon at the centre of a multimillion-pound compensation scandal that has landed the IMF head, Christine Lagarde, in court has announced he is returning to politics, reports The Guardian.
Bernard Tapie, a former government minister and one-time owner of Olympique Marseille football club, says he wants to deal with “youth unemployment” and see off the Front National after the far-right party’s regional election success.
In an interview with Journal du Dimanche, Tapie said he had decided to return to politics because the FN’s results were an “unmistakable alarm signal” and he wanted to “put an end to the Front National’s rise”.
“The worst was avoided by the Socialist candidates deciding to withdraw, which I salute them for,” Tapie told the JDD. “But in doing so we have kind of smashed the thermometer in order to hide the fact that we have a fever.”
Tapie, who served in François Mitterrand’s Socialist government as minister for cities between December 1992 and March 1993 but later supported centre-right president Nicolas Sarkozy, added that politicians were making mistakes that would lead to “an apocalypse if the FN gets into power”.
“It’s time the politicians stopped talking about the consequences of the unhappiness of FN voters, and started to bring solutions to the causes of their problems,” Tapie added.
He promised to come up with a project before the end of January 2016, to get “all unemployed 18- to 25-year-olds in work”. He named it the 2016 Tapie plan and called for national unity to support his ideas.
Asked if his ultimate ambition was to stand for president in 2017, the businessman, who spent six months in prison in the mid-90s for football match-fixing, said: “Everything in its own time. Politics is not just about being elected.”