L'AFFAIRE BETTENCOURT

PHOTOS: Liliane BETTENCOURT,heiress of L'ORÉAL
Mr.BANIER with Yves Saint Laurentright in glasses)
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Published: August 21, 2009
in "THE TIMES"
PARIS
(Francois Durand/Getty Images)




L'AFFAIRE BETTENCOURT
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IS HE WORTH IT ?

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The Left Bank refuge of François-Marie Banier lies hard by an ancient cobblestone lane where gallant musketeers once hatched royal intrigues.

Now Mr. Banier, a noted photographer of celebrity portraits, is at the center of an epic feud sundering the family of Liliane Bettencourt, the aging heiress to the L’Oréal cosmetics fortune, in a drama of intrigue and recriminations worthy of “The Three Musketeers.”

Mr. Banier, 62, whose glossy work has regularly appeared in The New Yorker and Vanity Fair, has long traveled between Paris and New York, befriending celebrities since he was a striking youth with the sleek physique of a Jean Cocteau drawing — charming the likes of Salvador Dalí and Yves Saint Laurent in the 1960s and, more recently, Princess Caroline of Monaco and Johnny Depp.

By September, though, the peripatetic Mr. Banier will exchange private island sojourns, Mallorca vacations and Caribbean yachts for a spare courtroom in Nanterre outside Paris.

He faces criminal charges and a potential prison term of three years for “abus de faiblesse,” essentially exploiting the frailty of the 86-year-old Madame Bettencourt to reap gifts valued at about 1.3 billion euros in cash, life insurance policies and art.

The case has been steady fodder for the French news media, offering a rare glimpse of the gilded life of Liliane Bettencourt, the richest woman in Europe with a net worth that Forbes estimated this year at $13.4 billion.

Madame Bettencourt lives discreetly behind the high cream walls and towering pines of an Art Moderne mansion just outside Paris.
Yet this summer she managed to make Vanity Fair’s best-dressed hall of fame with her smart trouser suits, Swatch watches and a personal style she described to the magazine as “despoiled, but colorful.”

Footsteps away in her pricey St. James neighborhood of Neuilly-sur-Seine (one of the richest Paris' neighborhood in France) is the spacious home of her daughter, Françoise Bettencourt-Meyers, 56.
But these neighbors aren’t on speaking terms.

The break came when Mrs. Bettencourt-Meyers, a pianist and writer, filed a criminal complaint in December 2007 against Mr. Banier alleging that he was manipulating her mother for his financial gain, provoking an investigation by the Brigade Financière, the financial investigative arm of the national police.

This year the L’Oréal matriarch and her daughter have communicated twice — in the blunt, unforgiving language of newspaper interviews.

“I have known François-Marie Banier for more than 20 years,” said Madame Bettencourt in a rare interview with the newspaper 'Le Journal du Dimanche' last December.
“My husband knew him for 20 years. What fly has bitten my daughter?”

Jealousy, she suggested, could be the root of the legal conflict.
“My daughter is more introverted than someone very sociable like François-Marie Banier,” she said.
“That’s a little annoying for her. But in the past she was always a cool child.”

In an interview in July with the news magazine 'Le Point', the daughter countered that Mr. Banier’s 'objective' is clear:
"break away my mother from our family to profit from her.
I will not let it happen.”

Today mother and daughter pass each other frostily in the L’Oréal boardroom and shareholder meetings, according to their high-priced lawyers, where a strained silence is maintained by three family directors, Mrs. Bettencourt-Meyers; her husband, Jean-Pierre Meyers; and Madame Bettencourt, who ultimately has ceded most of her 27.5 percent of L’Oréal shares to her daughter through the family holding company, Téthys.

Left unspoken is the name of the impish and frenetic Renaissance man —writer, painter photographer, celebrity courtier— who provoked this cold war.

Mr. Banier insists that he is nothing but a bystander swept up in a raw family quarrel and denies emphatically that he has manipulated the heiress, who inherited her fortune from her father, Eugène Schueller, founder of L’Oréal, which is celebrating its 100th anniversary.

“I have never sought to influence Madame Bettencourt for my gain or in favor of others who benefited from her generosity, ”Mr. Banier wrote in French in answer to written questions from this reporter.“
"This story distresses me and makes me sad for my friend Liliane Bettencourt.
In reality, this is about a mother-daughter conflict in which I am an outsider.”

END OF THE TIMES ARTCLE
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But if one looks at the Wikipedia, the story is:

"By most acounts Liliane Bettencourt, 87, heiress of L'Oréal, residing Neuilley-sur-Seine, met François-Marie Banier, a French writer, artist and celebrity photographer, in 1987 when he was commissioned to photograph her for the French magazin 'ÉGOISTE'.

Over the ensuing years, Mr. Banier and Mrs. Bettencourt became friends and she became his first benefactor, bestowing gifts upon him estimated to be worth as much as € 1.3 billion.

These gifts include, amongst other things:
a life insurance policy worth € 253 million, in 2003
another life policy worth € 262 million, in 2006
11 works of art, valued @ 20 million, in 2001
(inluding paintings by Picasso, Matisse, Mondrian, Delaunay and Léger,
a photography by surrealist Man Ray)
and Cash

The life insurance policies were alledgelly signed over to Mr. Banier, after
the two recovering stays in Hospital of Mrs. Bettencourt, in 2003 and 2006.



The judicial trial, has been postponed until september 2010.







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