Heiress begins legal fight for mother’s €1bn gifts to lover

A FRENCH family drama worthy of a soap opera landed in court yesterday, as the daughter of France’s richest women questioned whether her mother has lost her mind and frittered away a fortune on a man known for befriending high-society celebrities.

Francoise Bettencourt Meyers’ two-year legal campaign against the man she accuses of taking advantage of Liliane Bettencourt, her 87-year-old mother, has already included a failed attempt to have her mother put under court-ordered supervision. A judge heard her complaint yesterday.

Bettencourt, heiress to the French cosmetics giant, L’Oreal, has a fortune estimated at $13.4 billion.

Her only child, the 56-year-old Bettencourt Meyers, claims that author and photographer Francois-Marie Banier, 62, has taken advantage of her mother’s alleged “mental frailty” to wring gifts including cash and art worth about €1 billion.

Last September, a French prosecutor dropped his own investigation into the affair after finding that Bettencourt was in full possession of her mental and physical capacities and that she hadn’t been taken advantage of by Banier.

The daughter is in line to inherit all of her mother’s shares in L’Oreal.

In an interview on Thursday with the French newspaper Le Monde, Banier denied he had ever taken advantage of Bettencourt.

Banier said he met Bettencourt in 1969 when he was 22 in the home of Pierre Lazareff, a French journalist. He says he exchanged “thousands” of letters with the older woman over the years, and that her gifts were over a 10-year period beginning in 1995.

“What shocks people is that a woman of her standing would break conventions like this,” Banier said. “What she gave me is nothing alongside what she taught me.”

Bettencourt has made only one public statement on the affair, telling Le Journal du Dimanche newspaper last year that her gifts to Banier “were not very much” in proportion to her wealth.

“My daughter is going to have to accept that I’m a free woman,” she said.