The Bettencourt Affair: 8 Found Guilty of Taking Advantage of the World's Richest Woman

Editor's note: This Shark questions why the "Frogs" can prosecute their criminals while the judges, lawyers and bankers in the Probate Court of Cook County who robbed Alice R. Gore go free??? Lucius Verenus, Schoolmaster, ProbateSharks.com

 The Bettencourt Affair: 8 Found Guilty of Taking Advantage of the World's Richest Woman

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Liliane Bettencourt

Horst Ossinger/picture-alliance/dpa/AP

By Peter Mikelbank

05/28/2015 AT 12:30 PM EDT

A court in Bordeaux, France, found eight men guilty on Thursday of taking advantage of the world's richest woman.

Among those sentenced to prison for exploiting 92-year-old Liliane Bettencourt were her chief financial advisor, a business associate and her closest "friend," society photographer François-Marie Banier – who during a 10-year period received over $1 billion in gifts from the L'Oréal heiress.

The Bettencourt affair, as it is known in France, is an immense political and financial soap opera that will continue to spin out for years to come. At its heart is a decade-long battle for control of an estimated $40 billion fortune.

In the Bordeaux trial, 10 defendants, including various business associates, lawyers, accountants, a government cabinet minister and the heiress's private nurse, were accused of exploiting Bettencourt's confidence. Ultimately, nine of them stood trial after the nurse, Alain Thurin, tried to commit suicide the night before the trial was due to start. He has recovered and is expected to stand trial in the future.

Bettencourt, who suffers from mixed dementia and Alzheimer's disease, neither testified nor attended the five-week trial, which ended in February.

During the trial, Banier defended accepting Bettencourt's largesse, which included paintings by Picasso and Monet. He claimed she derived pleasure from bestowing gifts on him. "I refused things like a mansion," he testified. "But she took it so poorly."

Prosecutors and Bettencourt's family, however, painted Banier as a manipulator who abused her generosity and failing mental health while conspiring to make himself her sole and unique heir.

On Thursday, the court pronounced eight of nine defendants guilty. Magistrates found Banier guilty of exercising "real psychological and moral control" over his aging patron and sentenced him to a maximum of three years in prison and a $412,000 fine. He was also ordered to pay a restitution of $175 million with interest to Bettencourt's family. Banier's boyfriend Martin D'Orgeval was also convicted and sentenced to 18 months in jail and a $165,000 fine.

Bettencourt's chief financial advisor Patrice de Maistre, who ran her empire from her private estate in Paris, was also found guilty. Justices sentenced the 67-year-old financial manager to 30 months in prison, a $275,000 fine and restitution of $13 million.

France's former budget minister Éric Woerth, whose wife worked for de Maistre, was the sole defendant to be acquitted on charges of "abuse of weakness" and accepting donations during the 2007 presidential election.

Bettencourt's daughter, Françoise Bettencourt-Meyers, and her grandsons were present on Thursday when the verdict was read out.

Following the verdict, Banier and D'Orgeval walked across the street to a café, while attorneys representing them told courthouse reporters the verdict would be appealed.

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Cleaners accused of sweeping up elderly sisters' fortune

 

April 4, 2015 4:48 PM

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Two cleaners who worked for a pair of elderly sisters are accused of stealing hundreds of thousands of …

Lyon (AFP) - Two cleaners who worked for a pair of elderly sisters have been accused of stealing hundreds of thousands of euros the women kept in cash in their home near Lyon in central France, a judicial source said Saturday.

The cleaners, men aged 41 and 44, were charged with theft on Friday and detained after a two-year police investigation which began shortly after the bodies of the sisters were discovered in their home in the suburb of Bron in April 2013.

An autopsy concluded that they had died four months earlier, but no foul play was suspected, according to the regional newspaper Le Progres.

One sister was a retired teacher, the other a former postal worker. But stashed in the house was 397,985 euros (nearly $437,000).

But that, it turned out, was just the tip of their treasure.

Living alone with no heirs, the sisters had designated neighbours as executors of their estate. In going over the papers of the elderly women, they discovered the sisters had amassed an even greater fortune.

But a total of nearly 1.9 million euros was missing, the judicial source said.

A police investigation into the missing money found some suspicious bank deposits made by the house cleaners. They were arrested Thursday along with three others, two of whom were released without charges while the third, a woman, was charged with receiving stolen goods and released.

Some of those detained said the money was found in two bags in the sisters' bedrooms.

Police said they have recovered "several hundred thousand euros" at the homes of the accused.

But it is still a mystery how the sisters became so rich, with Le Progres claiming that it could have been from property sales.

France

Bettencourt heiress case: judges prepare to bring L'Oreal tale to denouement

Celebrity photographer accused during five weeks of courtroom drama of exploiting Liliane Bettencourt’s frail mental state to get gifts

Society photographer Francois-Marie Banier. Photograph: AMEZ UGO/SIPA/REX/AMEZ UGO/SIPA/REX

Angelique Chrisafis in Paris

Wednesday 25 February 2015 13.35 EST Last modified on Thursday 26 February 2015 02.15 EST

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After five weeks of courtroom drama, judges will retire on Thursday to consider the story of the richest woman in France, Liliane Bettencourt, heiress to the world’s largest cosmetics firm, and the charges against an eccentric celebrity photographer and dandy whom she saw has her best friend, now accused of exploiting her frail mental state to get hundreds of millions of euros in gifts from her.
Also in the dock are nine other allegedly greedy hangers-on, including Bettencourt’s financial manager, whose trail of presents and brown envelopes are claimed to lead to the top of French politics and have raised issues of the very workings of the French state.
The family soap opera of the woman behind the L’Oreal empire that has unfurled in a courtroom in Bordeaux – mixing luxury, wealth and mental frailty in an investigation which could have long-term ramifications on politics and privacy issues – has gripped the public.
Bettencourt, now 92, had long been seen as the nation’s poor little rich girl. The only child of the French chemist who invented one of the first synthetic hair dyes and created L’Oreal, she lost her mother when she was five, began as an apprentice at the company at 15 and grew up in the spotlight. She was no stranger to controversy, not least when her father and her husband, the politician Andre Bettencourt, were accused of being Nazi collaborators during the second world war; L’Oreal later addressed charges of giving jobs to Nazi collaborators after the war by making sweeping boardroom changes.
In her peaceful widowhood at her mansion on the edge of Paris called The White House, a morose Bettencourt – estimated to be worth €33bn (£24bn), by Forbes magazine – was alleged to have found a new best friend in the outrageous and eccentric François-Marie Banier, a society photographer 25 years her junior. She showered him with so many gifts that even his own lawyer admitted in court that he had been “drowning in gold” and briefly made him her sole heir.

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Alarmed, Bettencourt’s only daughter brought a legal case accusing Banier of manipulating her frailty. The court heard how Bettencourt has been suffering from increasing dementia and by 2011 was unable to tell what year it was.
Banier, now 67, who first met Bettencourt when he photographed her for a magazine, presented himself in court as a rich and well-connected celebrity photographer, a charming eccentric who did not need the money. He was said to be the only person who really made Bettencourt laugh, sharing a passion for culture.
But certain domestic staff at the mansion described him otherwise. He would, they said, lie on her bed with his shoes on, tuck requests for money in her bra, call in the middle of the night and urinate in her flowerbeds. He would address Bettencourt – a woman so obsessed with her immaculate looks and slim figure that she lived surrounded by photos of her glamorous younger self — as “my fatty”. Bettencourt’s former secretary described him as a “guru”. Bettencourt’s daughter told the court he was a “conman”, bent on shattering her relationship with her mother, saying he “divided and conquered” the household to better control her.
The court heard how from 2006 to 2010, Banier received gifts from Bettencourt worth €414m, including life-insurance policies, paintings by Picasso, Matisse and Mondrian, manuscripts and cash. In court Banier conceded that just hearing the figures sparked “an enormous vertigo”. But he said Bettencourt chose to bestow the gifts, it “gave her immense pleasure to do it” and she had been of sound mind. He said if he tried to turn down gifts, she got angry. Most of the value of the gifts was paid back before the court case.
Banier’s lawyers said he was happy to be showered with gold, but that didn’t make it “an abusive act”.
But the state prosecutor – accusing him of robbing Bettencourt of her money “but mostly of her family life, the love and support of those close to her” – requested judges give him the maximum penalty of three years in prison and a €375,000 fine.
The amount of cash sloshing around the Bettencourt household and regularly dished out as gifts to several people was pored over in court. “When you’re called Bettencourt, you don’t help people out with a box of chocolates,” said one witness.
But the trial was more than just a family feud. Among the other accused is Eric Woerth , a former minister in Nicolas Sarkozy’s government and campaign treasurer for his 2007 presidential campaign. He is alleged to have taken an envelope of cash via his friend and fellow accused Patrice de Maistre, who managed Bettencourt’s fortune.
Bettencourt’s former accountant told the investigation she was asked by de Maistre in early 2007 to take out €150,000 cash for Woerth, adding, “It’s for Nicolas Sarkozy’s campaign.” These allegations tarnished Sarkozy, who after being voted out as president was placed under formal investigation for illegal campaign financing and taking advantage of Bettencourt.
Those charges against Sarkozy were dropped in October 2013 due to lack of evidence. Woerth, who told the court “I did not receive cash from de Maistre to finance this campaign or anything else” is likely to be acquitted over lack of evidence.
Another accused, Alain Thurin, 64, a former nurse for the frail L’Oreal heiress, tried to hang himself in the woods near his house just before the start of his trial and is currently in a coma.
All the accused deny the charges. The judges are expected to return verdicts before the summer. The Bordeaux court will now go on to hear several other spin-off cases from the initial Bettencourt investigation – including a trial for influence-peddling in Bettencourt’s entourage, breech of privacy relating to secret tapes made by Bettencourt’s butler, and the case of an investigating magistrate accused of leaking inquiry details to the media.

Prosecutor calls for Woerth's acquittal in Bettencourt case

February 20, 2015 2:18 PM

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French former minister Eric Woerth and his lawyer Jean-Yves Le Borgne (L) leave the courthouse of Bordeaux, southwestern France, on February 20, 2015 (AFP Photo/Mehdi Fedouach)

Bordeaux (AFP) - A French prosecutor on Friday called for former budget minister Eric Woerth to be acquitted of stolen property charges in a trial sparked by the alleged exploitation of France's richest woman Liliane Bettencourt.

"There are no accusations and no evidence sufficient to prove his guilt," deputy prosecutor Gerard Aldige said, referring to accusations that Woerth used some of the L'Oreal heiress's fortune to finance Nicolas Sarkozy's 2007 presidential campaign.
While giving evidence on February 10 in the trial in the southwest city of Bordeaux, Woerth denied taking roughly 50,000 euros ($56,000) from Patrice de Maistre, who managed Bettencourt's estate.
De Maistre, who is also on trial, has been accused of taking advantage of the 92-year-old heiress in getting her to hand over envelopes of cash to members of Sarkozy's conservative UMP party.
"I know what I did, I know what I didn't do," testified Woerth, a UMP member and budget minister from 2007-2010.
"I did not receive cash from Mister de Maistre to finance this campaign or anything else."

The affair tarnished the latter half of Sarkozy's presidency and when he lost the 2012 election, he was placed under formal investigation for illegal campaign financing and taking advantage of Bettencourt.

However, the charges against Sarkozy were dropped in October 2013 due to lack of evidence, but he has since been tied to or investigated in several other cases.

The prosecutor sought the maximum penalty of three years behind bars for Francois-Marie Banier, a 67-year-old artist who is godfather to Johnny Depp's daughter.

He is suspected of having taken advantage of the heiress, who showered him with gifts such as paintings by Picasso and Matisse, and millions of euros in cash.

Aldige also called for 18 months in prison for de Maistre.

Europe’s Leading Rabbi: Jews Must Begin Carrying Guns

Editor's note:  This Shark believes that Jews would be "out-gunned" by terrorists in Highland Park, Illinois due to recent gun law restrictions.  Lucius Verenus, Schoolmaster, ProbateSharks.com

Europe’s Leading Rabbi: Jews Must Begin Carrying Guns

Top Jewish org petitions EU to permit Jews to carry guns

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A French soldier helps secure the perimeter of a Jewish school in Paris as part of the highest level of security plan after last week's attacks by Islamist militants, Wednesday, Jan. 14 / AP

BY: Adam Kredo
January 15, 2015 5:00 am

One of Europe’s most prominent Jewish organizations is petitioning the European Union to pass new legislation that would permit Jewish community members to carry guns “for the essential protection of their communities,” according to a letter obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.
The European Jewish Association (EJA), which represents Jewish communities across Europe, says that gun license laws must be altered following a string of deadly attacks on Jews in France and other European countries, where anti-Semitism has been growing at an alarming rate.
The recent attacks, including one on a Kosher market that killed four, “have revealed the urgent need to stop talking and start acting” in a way that empowers Europe’s Jews, according to a letter sent Tuesday by EJA General Director Rabbi Menachem Margolin to EU leaders.
The EU, which has enacted very stringent gun control laws, should empower and train Jews to be proficient with guns in order to maintain their safety, according to Margolin.
“The Paris attacks, as well as the many challenges and threats which have been presented to the European Jewish community in recent years, have revealed the urgent need to stop talking and start acting,” Margolin writes.
“We hereby ask that gun licensing laws are reviewed with immediate effect to allow designated people in the Jewish communities and institutions to own weapons for the essential protection of their communities, as well as receiving the necessary training to protect their members from potential terror attacks.”
Margolin told the Free Beacon that he and the EJA have been warning for “a very long time” that anti-Semitism is growing in Europe and that it poses a direct threat to the continent’s Jewish population.
There has been a “dramatic increase of anti-Semitism in Europe,” Margolin said in a telephone interview on Wednesday.  “We demanded from the European governments some time ago that action should be taken [and] were not surprised to see the results in Paris.”
Many Jews are living in fear and have shunned popular community outposts such as synagogues and kosher markets out of fear of an attack like that in Paris.
“Many people today are not coming to synagogue because of the issue and they’d be more comfortable if they knew people were trained to react in an emergency,” Margolin said.
Attacks against Jews have been on the rise, as neo-Nazi parties and other anti-Semitic organizations gain a foothold in some European nations. However, the growth of anti-Semitism has not always been acknowledged by leaders.
“We need to recognize the warning signs of anti-Semitism, racism, and intolerance that once again threaten Europe and our European ideals,” Margolin wrote in his letter to the EU.
The situation cannot continue as it is, Margolin insisted.
Jewish community representatives should be armed and on guard at Kosher markets and synagogues, he said.
“We realize that we also have to do something to take responsibility in case it takes too long” for authorities to put the proper defenses into place, Margolin explained.
This would include stationing armed Jewish community members at popular hubs.
Meanwhile, extremists who have travelled to countries such as Syria, where they train alongside the Islamic State and other terror groups, are now returning home to Europe, where they pose a direct threat to Jews, according to the letter
“The European Jewish Association has long and publicly warned European governments of the need to clamp down firmly on any and all acts of terror wherever and whenever they arise,” the letter says.  “As you know, the danger is that much greater as many Europeans travel abroad to be indoctrinated into radical Islam, before returning to their European homelands to use their militant training to devastating effect.”
Any changes to the gun laws can be made in a safe and effective way, Margolin argues.
“Let there be no doubt, we are asking that all weapons will be issued for self-protection only, and to designated personnel that will undergo thorough investigation and training by local authorities,” he wrote.
Margolin said that he is currently in negotiations with EU leaders to relax certain gun restrictions, though some remain hesitant to do so.
“Some people are afraid it might bring the situation to be uncontrolled,” he said, noting that negotiations on the matter would include ways to ensure Jewish community members are properly trained to use weapons.
Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said that while guns could help Jews defend themselves against an individual attack, only authorities can protect them against a mass attack like those carried out in France.
“As to personally being armed, such a move could help when a Jewish person is threatened by thugs, but won’t help if G-d forbid, Charlie-type terror attacks are launched,” Cooper said.
“Bottom line: Only the Police and intelligence can protect France’s Jews from terrorism,” Cooper said, noting that it is expected French authorities will continue boosting defenses. “If the government doesn’t, then there is no long range future for Jews there.”
“In the meantime, additional steps by the community to train and defend Jews from hate attacks are appropriate, necessary, and prudent,” Cooper said. “I pray that all these steps will help.”

This entry was posted in National Security and tagged Anti-Semitism, France. Bookmark the permalink.

One of history’s first detectives, and a murder that changed history

• By Prof. Eric Jager, guest-blogging

• March 17 at 9:14 am

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Imagine the Zapruder film found in a drawer decades after JFK’s assassination. A comparable thing happened in the 1660s, when an unusual parchment scroll was discovered at an old château in the south of France. The scroll was a long-lost police report on the 1407 assassination of Louis of Orleans. Louis, who had often ruled in place of his insane brother, Charles VI, had been hacked to death in a Paris street one night by a gang of thugs wielding swords and axes.
The scroll, compiled in the turbulent days after the crime, reads like a police procedural. It contains an autopsy, eyewitness testimony from ordinary Parisians, and a step-by-step account of the police inquiry into the crime — a catastrophic event that would plunge France into civil war and lead to a devastating English invasion under Henry V.
Several years ago I examined the scroll at an archive in Pau, the town where it was found in the 1660s. I was researching the 1407 murder and the courageous man of law who had unmasked the killers — the Provost of Paris, or chief of police, Guillaume de Tignonville. I had already studied a transcript of his report but wanted to see the original, the work of one of history’s first detectives. Guillaume had solved the case at great personal risk, and mainly with shoe leather, intelligence, and a courageous pursuit of the truth.
Guillaume’s report, contained in the priceless scroll, gives us a unique inside look at how he went about solving the crime. Some of his investigative methods are still in use today — for example, collecting eyewitness testimony near a crime scene and searching for physical evidence. Other practices common back then, like judicial torture, have fallen by the wayside. Or have they?
Louis’s murder took place on the night of November 23, 1407, in the Rue Vieille du Temple — a narrow street in the Marais, perfect for an ambush. About 8 PM, a shoemaker’s wife named Jacquette, who lived in a house overlooking the street, was waiting for her husband to come home. Holding her baby, she watched a great lord riding down the street with about six men carrying torches. Jacquette stepped away from the window for a moment to put her baby to bed:

Suddenly she heard a noise in the street and someone shouting, “Kill him! Kill him!”
Had her husband gotten into an altercation on his way home?

She rushed back to the window, still holding her baby, and stared down at the street. But her husband was nowhere in sight.
The great lord was now right below her window. No longer mounted, he was “kneeling in the street,” surrounded by “seven or eight men wearing masks and holding swords and axes.” Several of the men also held torches. One of the lord’s hands was missing, and blood gushed from his severed wrist. Another man, apparently one of the lord’s attendants, lay motionless on the pavement nearby.
Jacquette saw the lord glancing around in terror at his assailants. “What is this?” he cried out. “What are you doing?”
They answered with their weapons. As blades flashed in the torchlight, the lord desperately “threw his arms in the air to fend off their blows.”
Jacquette watched in horror as a sword struck one of his upraised arms, nearly taking off the lord’s remaining hand.
In an instant, they were all “chopping and stabbing” at him. They “hammered” him as he swayed on his knees in their midst, blood flying everywhere.
Despite the onslaught, it took the man a long time to die.
Finally, a great ax blow from above “split open his head down to the teeth,” and he fell forward onto the pavement. A piece of his brain, knocked loose from his shattered skull, landed in the mud nearby.
Even after the lord lay “stretched out” in the street, clearly dead, the assassins kept up the attack, chopping and stabbing “as hard as they could” at his lifeless body, “beating” his bloody corpse — Jacquette would later say –“like a mattress.”
“Murder!” she screamed. “Murder!”
One of the killers looked up and yelled at her: “Shut up, you
damned woman! Shut up!”

Despite harsh penalties, violent crime was endemic in medieval Paris, and night was “the time of crime.” By nightfall, most people had barred their doors, shuttered their windows, and gone to bed. There was no public street lighting, and anyone still outdoors at night needed a torch and was also advised to travel in company — or carry arms. Some tools of trade could double as handy weapons: a cook’s knife or a carpenter’s hammer. And most noblemen carried swords or daggers as badges of rank, although Louis’s lightly armed squires were no match for assailants wielding swords, axes, half-lances, and huge metal-tipped maces.
It was also not unusual for criminals to threaten victims, or witnesses like Jacquette to silence them. Even some law officers lived in fear of the felons they pursued. One member of the nightwatch, or guet, while making his rounds, reportedly “sent two or three fiddlers in advance of him, so that their noisy playing would alert wrongdoers to his approach” (A Parisian Journal, 1418). The guet would make their rounds after the local church rang the curfew bell — not a signal to clear the streets but to cover all fires to protect the highly flammable wooden houses lining most streets. Louis’s assassins, in fleeing the crime scene, pretended to be the local watch, shouting at residents along their route to put out lights, even striding fiercely into shops to cut down candles with their blades.
If Louis’s killers could be caught, they might be destined for the great stone gibbet at Montfaucon to the north of the city wall. The gibbet could accommodate up to eighty bodies at once, raising a stench that often carried half a mile into the city. During one five-day period in 1431, sixty-two thieves were hanged there. And public beheadings, burnings, drownings and other punishments were often meted out at the city’s central market, Les Halles, and other locations. If brutal crime was common in medieval Paris, brutal punishment was as well.
(Excerpts from “Blood Royal,” copyright Eric Jager, courtesy of Little, Brown and Company.)
Next time: The Provost examines the victim’s corpse at the crime scene.