Successful businessman, sports leader, minister, singer, television animator, actor...But also the protagonist of long judicial problems that led him to jail.Bernard Tapie, who died this Sunday at age 78, had a life marked by the extremes.
Born in 1943 in Paris in a working family (his father was a worker), he studied electronic and young engineering already showed desire to achieve fame, trying without success as a singer under the name of Bernard Tapy.
He also tried as a motor racing pilot, in Formula 3, a path he left after suffering a serious accident.He worked in several companies in the electronic sector until in 1979 he founded his own firm, Groupe Bernard Tapie (GBT), dedicated to buying bankruptcy societies, sanitizing them and selling them with surplus value.Through their hands, well -known companies passed, such as the first private television channel in France (TF1) or the manufacturer of Donnay, but the most important, and that ended up being the origin of its misfortunes, was Adidas, German clothing firm and clothing firm andsports teams that in 1990 took 78 %.
In the mid -eighties he began to be invited to television programs.His exuberant personality and his spontaneity made him a popular animator throughout the country, especially among young people.Passionate about sports, in 1984 he created the cycling team "La Vie Claire", with which the French star Bernard Hinault won his fifth Tour de France and his third turn of Italy.
In 1986, Olympique de Marseille went on to control.The OM was the team with the most tradition in France, but it was in low hours and Tapie, as president, he refloated him signing great French and foreign players.
First French European champion
In 1991, the OM reached the final of the then Europe.Tapie took a good part of the national glory.
Also highlighted in politics.Animated by socialist president François Mitterrand, in 1988 he presented himself to the legislative and was elected independent deputy.In February 1992 he was appointed Minister of Urban Planning, a position he resigned a month later to defend himself from a complaint of an former partner, although he returned in December.
In 1993 he was elected deputy for the movement of the left -wing radicals (MRG) and a year later he headed the candidacy for the European Parliament Formation.His list was second at the national level and he was one of his Eurodiputados.But he had to leave politics for his growing legal problems.First, Adidas was seized in 1992 and attributed to the Credit Lyonnais bank, which was then public.
The bank sold it to a French industrial and Tapie asked the State for compensation for considering that it had been unfairly deprived of the surplus value of the operation.From there a real judicial labyrinth began.In 2008, an arbitration decided to compensate him with just over 400 million euros, but that ruling was appealed, he accused of fraud and his property seized for an alleged treatment of favor.
Adidas was his main legal involve.
Prison entrance
And in 1996 he was accused of bankruptcy in a summary related to the management of his FIBT and GBT companies.He was in prison from February to July 1997.In 2001 he could briefly return to OM, in which he collided with the then coach, the Spanish Javier Clemente, who left the club.
In the second half of the 90s, and under the legal prohibition of doing business, he returned to television, recorded an album and even stood out as an actor: he debuted nothing less than with the famous director Claude Lelouch, continued with Telefilmes, starred in a series of a series oftelevision and the theater "someone flew over the cuckoo nest".
He married twice and had three children.Tapie himself summed up in 2013 in the newspaper Le Parisien his intense life: "I have known all environments: business, show, sport.But none is as disgusting as politics ".
A stomach cancer, announced in 2017, withdrew it from the first line and, despite operations and treatments, progressively extended to other organs and has finally cost life.
