The long-running Bettencourt affair reached its climax on Thursday when the society photographer at the centre of the saga, François-Marie Banier, was jailed for two-and-a-half years for taking advantage of the mental frailty of billionaire L'Oréal heiress Liliane Bettencourt. Accused of “abuse of frailty”, Banier is said to have been given some 414 million euros over the course of his 20-year association with Bettencourt, now 92, including cash, works of art and insurance policies. He was given a three-year-prison term, six months of which were suspended, fined 350,000 euros and ordered to pay Liliane Bettencourt 158 million euros in damages and interest.
Also jailed was Bettencourt's former wealth manager Patrice de Maistre who, too, was found guilty of preying on Bettencourt's frail mental state. He was jailed for 18 months and fined 250,000 euros. However, as widely expected and in line with the prosecution's own demands, the former budget minister Éric Woerth, who had been the treasurer for Nicolas Sarkozy's successful presidential campaign in 2007, was cleared of profiting from the abuse of Liliane Bettencourt to fund Sarkozy's UMP with cash payments via a Swiss bank account. Woerth, who remains a Member of Parliament, and de Maistre were also cleared on Thursday after a separate but related trial over alleged 'influence peddling'. The fact that Woerth, the only politician in the dock, was the only one of the defendants to be acquitted in the main 'abuse of frailty' trial means that in effect the judges stripped the Bettencourt affair of its political dimension.
The main Bettencourt trial in Bordeaux of a total of ten men accused of profiting from the dementia-suffering multi-billionaire Liliane Bettencourt was the climax of a long saga that dates back to 2007. Eight of them were found guilty by the court on Thursday. The court in Bordeaux had heard the extraordinary detail of how a disparate group of defendants, including high-society dandies, wealth managers, lawyers, solicitors and a former minister, gravitated around the fortune of the L’Oréal cosmetic company heiress, as first revealed by Mediapart in 2010. The complex tale also involved French politics and allegations of secret political funding. At one point former president Niclas Sarkozy was himself placed under formal investigation – one step short of being charged - over the affair. Though eventually the case was dropped, the investigating judges produced a withering assessment of the ex-head of state's “manifestly abusive behaviour”.
Woerth has faced two trials this year, the first in the 'main' Bettencourt court case, involving the alleged 'abuse' of the heiress's frailty. Specifically he was accused of illicitly receiving at least 50,000 euros – and up to 150,000 euros – in cash as covert political donations from the Bettencourts via Patrice de Maistre when he, Woerth, was the election campaign treasurer for Sarkozy’s 2007 presidential bid. Woerth was questioned for just one hour during the main trial, during which public prosecutor Gérard Aldigé displayed an all but obsequious regard towards him, as if it was already established that the cash donations were impossible to prove.
That was all the more astonishing given that the case heard evidence that the Bettencourt household was once the scene of regular visits by politicians who received cash-stuffed manila envelopes, and that the agendas of both Woerth and Maistre have revealed that the pair held unusual meetings during the pre-election period in 2007 when important sums of cash were withdrawn – without any other explanation - from the Bettencourt accounts in Switzerland and in France.
Furthermore, Liliane Bettencourt’s former bookkeeper, Claire Thibout has stuck to her account of the cash donations intended for Woerth throughout the four hours of questioning she was submitted to by defence lawyers during her testimony via a live video-conference link with Paris on February 10th.
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In fact, in their judgement the judges state that “there exists a strong suspicion that money was handed over from Bettencourt funds” before adding “without it being demonstrated that the handover definitely occurred”. They also note that : “It has not been shown that Éric Woerth knew of the illicit origin of this sum or sums.” To have done so, the judges argue, he would have needed to have known of the state of Liliane Bettencourt's vulnerability or the existence of financial fraud, something which had not been demonstrated, they said.
It is now likely that the conservative UMP party, whose leader Nicolas Sarkozy faces several corruption investigations, will seize on Woerth's acquittal to launch a backlash against the magistrates who headed the investigation that led to the trial – and who in 2013 dismissed the case against Sarkozy before bringing charges against Woerth.
In the second trial the former government minister was jointly charged with Patrice de Maistre over claims of 'influence peddling'; the claim was that that Woerth procured a top honour for de Maistre in return for the latter giving Woerth's wife a lucrative job. The charges centred upon the recruitment in early 2007, allegedly at Woerth’s behest, of Woerth’s wife Florence as a financial advisor for Clymène, the company that manages Liliane Bettencourt’s wealth from the dividends she receives as principal shareholder of L’Oréal, and which was headed by Maistre. Woerth, who had only known Maistre personally for a matter of months, subsequently lobbied for the latter to be awarded the Légion d’honneur, France’s highest award for civil merit.
During the ceremony on July 14th 2007, it was Woerth, who had just been appointed budget minister under newly-elected president Nicolas Sarkozy, who personally presented Maistre with the honour. Both men have now been cleared of the charges, the judges ruling there was insufficient evidence.
'Banier is a crook. One day there’ll be a trial. Here we are'
However, the court was convinced in the main trial that the prosecution had produced enough evidence to show François-Marie Banier's guilt in taking advantage of Liliane Bettencourt. During the proceedings Banier, 67, had depicted himself as a tortured artist who worked ceaselessly, and had insisted he was in no way either a society wheeler-dealer nor a swindler. “I am not a spoilt child … I am not a dandy,” he protested. Friends such as the singer Vanessa Paradis and the businessman Pierre Bergé had acted as character witnesses, sending statements in support of Banier. He also suggested he was the outraged victim of a hypothetical domestic plot (see more on early hearings here). But his attitude in court appeared to alienate the judges, who ultimately ruled that he had indeed taken advantage of Bettencourt's weakness for his own financial gain.
Liliane Bettencourt's daughter Françoise Meyers-Bettencourt, who under French law had a right to be heard as a civil party to the criminal proceedings, told the court she had triggered the initial complaint over abuse of weakness back in 2007 simply “to protect my mother”. She said that before his death in 2007 her father André Bettencourt had told her: “Banier is a crook. One day there’ll be a trial. Here we are,” she said.
In addition to Woerth, de Maistre and Banier, seven others had been charged in relation to the allegations of 'abuse' of Liliane Bettencourt's frail state. Martin d'Orgeval, Banier’s partner, charged with “abuse of frailty”; lawyer Pascal Wilhelm, who succeeded Patrice de Maistre as wealth and investment manager for Liliane Bettencourt, also charged with “abuse of frailty”; facing the same charge again was Stéphane Courbit, a reality TV show and online gambling entrepreneur and client of Wilhelm, whose company LOV received more than 143 million euros from Bettencourt in when Wilhelm was her manager in 2011; Alain Thurin, former nurse to Bettencourt who, in her revised will, was bequeathed 10 million euros but who did not ultimately stand trial, having tried to hang himself shortly before; solicitor Patrice Bonduelle, accused of“conspiring in abuse of frailty” with Wilhelm, and another solicitor, Jean-Michel Normand, accused of complicity with François-Marie Banier, Martin d'Orgeval and Patrice de Maistre in exploiting Bettencourt’s diminished faculties; Carlos Cassina Vejarano, a former administrator of Bettencourt’s Seychelles island d’Arros, charged with “abuse of frailty” and “fraud” for having misappropriated the funds allocated for the upkeep of the Indian Ocean property.
Martin d'Orgeval was convicted and given an 18-month suspended prison sentence, while lawyer Pascal Wilhem was give an 18-month jail term. Stéphane Courbit, too, was found guilty and fined 250,000 euros. Carlos Vejarano was given a nine-month jail term and fined 250,000 euros, while Patrice Bonduelle was given a six-month suspended sentence and a 80,000 euro fine. Jean-Michel Normand was given a 12-month suspended sentence and fined 100,000 euros.
Lawyers for Banier and de Maistre have announced they will appeal against the verdicts and all those who were jailed will remain free pending any appeal hearings.
The court also ruled that former nurse Alain Thurin will stand trial on October 5th, 2015, with Patrice Bonduelle and Pascal Wilhelm, the trio accused of complicity in commiting an abuse of weakness in relation to Liliane Bettencourt. The judges said that the nature of that charge meant all three men had to be tried at the same time.
However, the verdicts in these two trials and even the new trial involving Patrice Bonduelle and Pascal Wilhelm is by no means the end of the Bettencourt affair. In a related case, magistrate Isabelle Prévost-Desprez was placed under investigation in July 2012 for “violation of professional secrecy” for allegedly passing on to two journalists from Le Monde classified information from her early investigation into the Bettencourt affair. She is due to stand trial on June 8th.
Yet another trial involves the alleged breach of personal privacy concerning the publication of the so-called ‘butler tapes’. The tapes were secretly recorded by L'Oréal heiress Liliane Bettencourt's butler over a period of one year, between 2009 and 2010. They contained conversations between Bettencourt and Patrice de Maistre and other advisors. After Mediapart obtained a copy of the recordings, it began publishing in June 2010 - in audio sequences and transcriptions - those contents that it considered were clearly of a public interest. French weekly magazine Le Point also obtained a copy and similarly published transcriptions from the recordings. They exposed, among other things, evidence of tax evasion, influence peddling, suspicions of illegal political funding and interference in justice proceedings by a French presidential advisor.
The butler, Pascal Bonnefoy and five journalists have been placed under investigation for the alleged offence. The latter are Mediapart’s editor-in-chief Edwy Plenel, the website’s investigative reporter Fabrice Arfi, former Mediapart investigative journalist Fabrice Lhomme (now with daily Le Monde), the editor-in-chief of Le Point, Franz-Olivier Giesbert and its former editor, Hervé Gattegno. No date has yet been fixed for this trial.
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- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter