The French entrepreneur, politician, sports official and ex-owner of Adidas, Bernard Tapie, died in Paris at the age of 78.
The French daily called it “l’homme aux mille vies” Le Monde Bernard Tapie in her obituary on Sunday morning. A description that perfectly describes the highly controversial entrepreneur, sports official, politician, actor and entertainer who was born in Paris. Because Tapie was actually a man of a thousand lives.
Coming from a humble background, he managed to become an economic mogul with diligence, cunning, but also with a certain unscrupulousness. His success was based on buying bankrupt companies, which he restructured and resold at a profit. He initially succeeded in doing this with two paper companies and the battery manufacturer Leclanché Wonder, which he later sold to the Union Carbide (Ucar) group. When the brutal dictator of the Central African Republic, Jean-Bédel Bokassa, had to go into exile after a coup at the end of the 1970s, Tapie bought his hotels and castles in France for a fraction of their value – and with the profit laid the foundation for his empire.
Around 30 years ago he bought the German sporting goods company Adidas
In 1990 he secured a majority stake in Adidas for just 1.6 billion francs, around 240 million euros. The sporting goods manufacturer from Herzogenaurach was struggling with major problems at the time, was not in a good position, but Tapie was able to quickly set the course for a turnaround. But because he pushed into politics at the same time – Tapie had been a member of the French National Assembly since 1989 and in 1992 became French Minister for Urban Affairs in a socialist government (Ministre de la Ville) – he soon commissioned the Crédit Lyonnais bank to sell the shares. The transaction, which gave the bank a far higher profit than the entrepreneur and, as a result of which Robert-Louis Dreyfus took over the majority of the shares, resulted in a long-standing legal battle. There were investigations into the highest political circles, for example against Christine Lagarde, then Minister for Economic Affairs. It was not until July 2019 that Tapie was acquitted of charges of fraud and evasion of public funds.
At Olympique Marseille he brought in Rudi Völler and Franz Beckenbauer
His involvement in sport was not without its upsets either: Tapie, who had been a Formula 3 driver at a young age and was later able to celebrate the Tour de France successes of Bernard Hinault and Greg LeMond as the owner of a cycling team, stood from 1986 to 1994 at the helm of the football club Olympique Marseille. During this time, the club was the only one from France to win the Champions League in Munich in 1993. Tapie brought Franz Beckenbauer as coach and Rudi Völler as goalscorer, but got caught up in a bribery affair, which resulted in a forced relegation for the club and an eight-month prison sentence for Tapie.
All the scandals in France have not harmed its popularity. The sports newspaper L’Équipe took leave of “Nanard” on Sunday, as she called him almost affectionately. And in the last years of his life he only had to leave his house in Paris, and he was immediately surrounded by onlookers and fans. Recently, however, Tapie only went out very rarely, his cancer, which he had already made public in 2017, deteriorated noticeably. Bernard Tapie died on Sunday morning at the age of 78. One of his sons wrote on Instagram: “Goodbye, my phoenix.”