Sarkozy caught up in L’Oréal heiress money scandal
French president accepted envelopes from Liliane Bettencourt alleges accountant
The ongoing L’Oréal family feud has taken another turn embroiling French president Nicolas Sarkozy. Amidst the French government’s enquiry into alleged tax evasion by Liliane Bettencourt – L’Oréal’s majority shareholder and France’s wealthiest woman – the heiress’ former accountant told investigators that Bettencourt had made an illegal €150,000 cash donation to the Sarkozy presidential campaign in 2007, claims emphatically denied by the Elysee Palace who labelled them “smears”.
Several revelations have also surfaced from secret tapes recorded by Bettencourt’s former butler, which have become the chief exhibit in the legal action brought by Bettencourt’s estranged daughter Françoise Meyers-Bettencourt against her mother. She accuses photographer Francois-Marie Banier of abusing Bettencourt’s (87) “weakness of mind” to persuade her to hand over €1bn’s worth of cash, art and life insurance.
The tapes made public details of Sarkozy’s attempted intervention on behalf of Bettencourt in the aforementioned legal wrangle between the heiress and her daughter.
Their content is also troubling the career of Sarkozy’s employment minister and former budget minister Eric Woerth, who has been accused of ignoring Bettencourt’s tax evasion in return for funds. Woerth has been further plagued by the revelation that he’d found his wife, an accountant, work as a financial advisor to Bettencourt.
To complicate matters further, Meyers-Bettencourt is married to a director of Nestlé, which holds a 28.9% stake in L’Oréal in comparison to Bettencourt’s 30.04%. But in the event of Bettencourt’s death, Nestlé will be legally prevented from increasing its stake. Meyers-Bettencourt however denies that this has influenced the legal action against her mother or that said legal action has been undertaken to facilitate a Nestlé take-over of L’Oréal.