Lawsuit to Go to Trial Over L’Oréal Heiress
Christina Passariello
December 14, 2009
The Wall Street Journal
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704201404574590322480671260.html
PARIS—A lawsuit over L’Oréal heiress Liliane Bettencourt’s gifts of €1 billion ($1.5 billion) to a photographer friend will go to trial mid-April, a French judge decided, a move that promises to throw personal details of one of France’s most private families into the open.

The lawsuit was filed two years ago by Ms. Bettencourt’s only daughter, Françoise Bettencourt-Meyers, who accuses the photographer, François-Marie Banier, 62, of exploiting her mother’s mental weakness. Over the course of several years, Ms. Bettencourt, 87, lavished Mr. Banier with gifts, including life insurance policies and paintings by artists such as Picasso and Matisse. Through her lawyer, Ms. Bettencourt, the daughter of the French cosmetics company’s founder, denied that Mr. Banier took advantage of her.

Mr. Banier’s lawyer, Herve Temime, said his client wasn’t afraid of prosecution. “He’s in a hurry to be absolved of this defamation,” he said.

In the deliberations leading up to Friday’s decision to send the case to trial, the debate centered on Ms. Bettencourt’s mental health. The court has ordered her to submit to tests performed by three court-appointed doctors. In the past, Ms. Bettencourt refused to comply with mental health exams requested by the court.

“Enough of this. I’m not a vegetable!” she has said to past requests, according to her lawyer, Georges Kiejman, who said that the elderly woman is nearly deaf.

Ms. Bettencourt has transferred ownership of her 30% stake in L’Oréal, currently worth about €13.7 billion, to her daughter.

Ms. Bettencourt and Ms. Bettencourt-Meyers, 56, sit on L’Oréal’s board but aren’t on speaking terms, according to their lawyers.

Inside the L’Oreal Family Feud
Eric Pape
December 12, 2009
The Daily Beast
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-12-12/inside-the-loreal-family-feud/full/
A French court just ruled that aging heiress Liliane Bettencourt can keep her billions—but is her daughter right that she’s too sick to control it?

Europe’s wealthiest woman may be enduring a traumatizing battle between her daughter and a longtime friend that threatens to sabotage her golden years, but she got an early Christmas present. A French court announced December 9 that Liliane Bettencourt, the eccentric 87-year-old L’Oréal heiress, would retain full control of her fortune—at least for the time being.

This is no small present. Forbes last valued her wealth at $13.4 billion.

Bettencourt’s daughter—and sole direct heir—Françoise Bettencourt-Meyers insists that her mother suffers from a “neurological affliction” that has made her vulnerable to a billion-dollar manipulator. She asked a court to appoint an independent steward over her mother’s financial empire to protect the old lady, who has long declined an independent evaluation, but the court refused to take up the issue, citing a lack of evidence. But days later, on December 11, another court finally ordered one, by three medical experts, with a report due by March. Score that as a significant early victory for the daughter.

This week’s decisions were just the latest turns in this truly twisted legal saga. Now the case will return to its primary focus: Is celebrity photographer and artist François-Marie Banier a criminal who deserves as much as three years in prison (and/or a half-million dollar in fines) for preying on Bettencourt’s supposedly weakened physical and mental state to obtain nearly $1.5 billion in gifts? (Bettencourt has insisted that she is fine and that she can give money to whomever she wishes.) The court also announced that Banier wouldn’t be judged until April 15-16.

The legal and media battle pits a possibly debilitated mother—who has sided with Banier—against her media-shy and introverted daughter in a case that carries echoes of the Brooke Astor case, albeit on a much grander scale. The Bettencourt battle is roiling the European worlds of art, philanthropy, and beauty. On a grittier level, it is a triangular tale of deception, manipulation, and greed—and the story of a withering love of a mother and a daughter.

The painful destruction of that mother-daughter relationship was on full display last week when Françoise Bettencourt-Meyers sent a heart-wrenching handwritten letter to her mother’s home in the posh Parisian suburb of Neuilly to let her know that she had sought an independent steward, for her aging mother’s own good. “My mommy dearest, as sad and painful as it is for you and for me, I have to write these words,” Françoise began. Bettencourt-Meyers called her mom an “admirable woman” and highlighted the matriarch’s role in the development of “this beautiful company” that was founded by Bettencourt’s own father.” Still, the letter goes on, “you are, for me, and above all, my mom.”

The touching “private” letter goes on to argue that Bettencourt-Meyers is taking action because Banier (whose name goes unmentioned) continues to keep Bettencourt from family, friends, and trustworthy employees. “All of that and your health, of course, force me to react, to not accept [the situation] with my eyes closed,” she writes. Bettencourt-Meyers insists that she is not taking this action out of “personal interest,” but rather as her “duty as a daughter” whose only goal is for her mother to be surrounded by people “about whom there is neither doubt, nor suspicion.”

Despite signing the letter as the “daughter who loves you beyond what we are now going through,” Bettencourt has conveyed a few doubts about that love. Her lawyer described the “very affectionate handwritten letter” as “a low blow” that highlights the daughter’s “indecent impatience to take control” of L’Oréal shares that she will inherit upon the death of her aging mother soon enough. The attorney suggested Bettencourt might try to disinherit her daughter for “ingratitude.” (Given France’s strong inheritance laws, this is extremely unlikely.)

Why such anger? Because a copy of the letter found its way into the French daily Le Figaro the day after it reached Bettencourt’s home. Rather than remain “in the intimacy of the family,” the billionaire’s lawyer said that it ended up as a tool in a “vast media plan.”

And then there is the flamboyant Banier. The self-proclaimed author-artist-actor-screenwriter-photographer, who has snapped portraits of everyone from Johnny Depp to Princess Caroline of Monaco, and frequented Dali and the Picassos, spoke out for the first time since the case against him opened this summer. In an interview with the French daily Le Monde on December 9, the 62-year-old Banier said that people are trying to make Bettencourt seem “senile.” He said that Bettencourt has long pushed gifts upon him to support his art, and he insists that he initially refused them. “These donations come from a woman who is completely healthy.” Besides, he notes, “I am not the only one, far from it, to have benefited.”

That is true. Since the late 1980s, Bettencourt has given an estimated $180 million to the Bettencourt-Schueller Foundation. On a more personal level, the court investigation suggests that Bettencourt may have also given away billions of dollars. In addition to the more than a billion dollars worth of checks, life insurance policies, art, and other gifts that she gave or promised Banier between 1997 and 2007, French financial brigade investigators found that Bettencourt gave more than $1.6 billion worth of art (and three negatives of photographs by Eugène Cuvelier worth $756,000) to another photographer, Martin d’Orgeval, according to the Journal du Dimanche. Of course, even if it is true that Bettencourt gave d’Orgeval such an enormous sum as well, it may not offer Banier much of a defense. Why? Because in his lengthy and rambling Le Monde interview, Banier notes that he “shares his life” with the 36-year-old d’Orgeval, who he has known for 17 years. In other words, Liliane Bettencourt may have given more than $3 billion to one couple.

Bettencourt has apparently given lesser sums to others, even buying a home at a cost of $750,000 for the daughter of a famous doctor she knows, and she has rewarded Lindsay Owen-Jones, the former head of L’Oréal, with nearly $240 million, if Banier’s own testimony to investigators can be believed. (Owen-Jones isn’t confirming the amount but he has said that the Bettencourts are very generous.) The difference, of course, is that Owen-Jones helped to earn a great deal of money for the Bettencourt family.

Still, Banier insists that he will be cleared as Bettencourt’s patterns of generosity become clear and other people speak out. As the case proceeds this winter and spring, a French court will try to figure out what the mercurial artist did—or didn’t—do, especially at times when Bettencourt may have been suffering from medical issues. But Banier suggested to Le Monde that the $1.5 billion isn’t as important as the 87-year-old woman’s friendship. “All that she has given me is nothing compared to what she has taught me,” he said.

Bettencourt-Meyers didn’t mention flattery, but she did warn her mother against manipulations and lies in her touching, torturous letter. “Don’t listen to those who would make you believe that I am animated by bad intentions. You are my mom. I am your only child, and you know deep down that [what they say] isn’t true.”

But does she? Does anybody?

Photographer to stand trial over L’Oreal heiress gifts
Hugh Schofield
December 11, 2009
BBC News, Paris
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8409153.stm
A French celebrity photographer is to stand trial over allegations he took hundreds of millions of euros from one of the world’s richest women.

Francois-Marie Banier is accused of exploiting the mental fragility of 87-year-old Liliane Bettencourt, heiress to the L’Oreal cosmetics fortune.

He denies the charges. A French court has set the trial for April next year.

Last week Mrs Bettencourt’s daughter asked that she be placed under court authority.

A judge in the city of Nanterre ruled that Mr Banier, described by correspondents as a 62-year-old aesthete, former gigolo and befriender of rich old ladies, does have a criminal case to answer for “abuse of mental fragility”.

In his youth, Francois-Marie Banier was the friend of 1960s cultural icons like Salvador Dali and Samuel Beckett.

Today he is better known as a photographer, but also as a serial charmer of society women, including Mrs Bettencourt, daughter of the founder of the L’Oreal cosmetics company.

Over the last 20 years she is reckoned to have given Mr Banier around 1bn euros worth of gifts, in the form of property, art works and life insurance policies.

But Liliane Bettencourt’s largesse excited the suspicions of her daughter, Francoise, who decided that her mother - in her alleged dotage - was coming under the malign influence of the man the daughter calls the “predator”.

The daughter filed a private criminal prosecution, and now the judge has ruled that the case is legitimate.

“Should a daughter who sees her weakening mother under the power of a predator, a man doing everything he can to break the bond of filial love, say nothing, do nothing?” Reuters news agency quoted Olivier Metzner, a lawyer for Francoise Bettencourt, as saying at the pre-trial hearing.

Ms Bettencourt has been fighting for two years to bring charges against Mr Banier, but prosecutors have been unwilling to pursue the case as her mother has refused to submit to mental health tests.

Liliane Bettencourt has dismissed claims she was conned by a fraudster, and insists she was in full possession of her faculties.

“I am here to say on behalf of Mrs Bettencourt: ‘That’s enough! I am not a vegetable. You will not bend me to your will’,” her lawyer George Kiejman told the court.

The judge has now ruled that she must undergo mental tests to see if she really is fragile, or as her lawyers insists, actually of perfectly sound mind.

Heiress Case Delayed, With Medical Tests Ordered
Matthew Saltmarsh
December 11, 2009
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/12/world/europe/12iht-heiress.html?_r=1
PARIS — A criminal court near Paris delayed ruling Friday on a case against a man accused of exploiting the frailty of the richest woman in Europe, Liliane Bettencourt, but it ordered that Ms. Bettencourt undergo medical examinations for the case to go forward.

The court in Nanterre, west of Paris, is examining a suit by Françoise Bettencourt-Meyers, Ms. Bettencourt’s only child, who says she is seeking to protect her mother and her assets from François-Marie Banier, a writer and photographer of celebrity portraits. Isabelle Prévost-Desprez, the presiding judge, delayed ruling on the validity of the case until April 15 and 16. In the meantime, three independent medical examinations of Ms. Bettencourt will be required, said Astrid Granoux, a spokeswoman for the Nanterre prosecutor’s office.

Ms. Bettencourt-Meyers, 56, claims that Mr. Banier took advantage of her 87-year-old mother’s mental “frailty” to receive around €1 billion, or $1.46 billion, in gifts in the form of cash, life insurance policies and artworks including paintings by Matisse and Mondrian, according to her lawyer, Olivier Metzner.

“We are totally satisfied with the decision, it’s what we’d wanted,” Mr. Metzner said during an interview after the ruling.

During the hearing, he described Mr. Banier as a “predator” and asked whether a daughter, who sees her mother in decline, should “remain silent and do nothing?”

The daughter had also initiated a civil case requesting that her mother’s affairs be placed under judicial supervision given her fragile mental state. This week a court in Neuilly-sur-Seine, also near Paris, declined that request, citing the absence of the medical documentation. Mr. Metzner said that process was not over.

Ms. Bettencourt, via her lawyer Georges Kiejman, has insisted that she is in full possession of her faculties and that she gave the money to Mr. Banier merely as gifts to a friend, dismissing her daughter’s claims. The case has offered steady fodder for the French news media and a rare glimpse into the gilded life of Ms. Bettencourt, who inherited her fortune from her father, Eugène Schueller, founder of L’Oréal. Forbes magazine this year estimated her net worth at $13.4 billion.

Mr. Banier, 62, says that he is a bystander swept up in a raw family quarrel and denies manipulating the heiress. His lawyer, Hervé Temime, was not available to comment immediately after the ruling. But during an interview this week with Le Monde, Mr. Banier said Ms. Bettencourt was “a completely sane woman” and that he had refused the gifts “for a long time.” “I am not the only one who benefited — far from it,” he was quoted as saying in the interview.

Madame Bettencourt and her daughter have not been on speaking terms since Mrs. Bettencourt-Meyers, a pianist and writer, filed a complaint against Mr. Banier in December 2007 alleging manipulation for financial gain.

Initially, prosecutors had investigated the case, but last year they dropped an inquiry after finding that Mrs. Bettencourt was in full possession of her mental and physical capacities and that she had not been taken advantage of by Mr. Banier.

Madame Bettencourt remains L’Oreal’s biggest shareholder, retaining about 30 percent through the family holding company, Téthys. Her daughter sits on its board, and the two pass each other frostily in the boardroom and shareholder meetings, according to their high-priced lawyers, where a strained silence is maintained. They have chosen instead to communicate in blunt, unforgiving language in newspaper interviews.

After Madame Bettencourt’s husband, André Bettencourt, died in 2007, his daughter grew more suspicious of Mr. Banier’s influence, Mr. Metzner said. By contrast, Mr. Kiejman has accused the daughter, who is in line to inherit the l’Oreal stake, of “indecent haste” in seeking to seize “what is not yet entirely hers.”

In most accounts, the platonic ties between Madame Bettencourt and Mr. Banier date to 1987, when the photographer took an elegant photograph of the heiress for a glossy French magazine. Despite their age gap, the heiress and the photographer found common interests in art. Mr. Banier says he met the heiress and her husband, André, much earlier — in 1969. He would have been about 22, and his debut novel had just been published.

If indicted in a criminal case, Mr. Banier faces a potential prison term of three years and a fine of 375.000 euros for “abus de faiblesse,” or exploiting the frailty of Madame Bettencourt.