Bernard Tapie

January 26, 1943 – October 3, 2021

Paris, France

Bernard Roger Tapie (26 January 1943 – 3 October 2021) was a French businessman, politician and occasional actor, singer, and TV host. He was Minister of City Affairs in the government of Pierre Bérégovoy. He was the manager of a group of companies, notably owner of Adidas and Olympique de Marseille, manager of the Bernard Tapie Group and owner of the La Provence Group, which publishes the newspaper of the same name, as well as Corse-Matin. At the beginning of 1984, he presented his cycling team La Vie claire, then bought OM a few years later. In the 1990s, engaged in politics as a left-wing radical, he was twice Minister of the City in the Bérégovoy government, deputy for Bouches-du-Rhône twice, European deputy (his list obtained 12% in the 1994 elections) as well as general councilor for Bouches-du-Rhône. His political career ended due to his legal troubles. Involved in several financial scandals, he was convicted in the VA-OM affair (for which he was imprisoned in 1997 for nearly six months), in the Phocéa affair and in the Testut affair. In the 2010s, following an arbitration condemning the State to pay him 403 million euros in compensation in the context of the Crédit Lyonnais affair, he was prosecuted again, his death putting an end to the criminal proceedings. Tapie was born in Paris. He was a businessman who specialized in recovering bankrupt companies, among which Adidas is the most famous (he owned Adidas from 1990 to 1993); and owner of sports teams: his cycling team La Vie Claire won the Tour de France twice – in 1985 and 1986 – and his football club Marseille won the French championship four times in a row, and the Champions League in 1993. La Vie Claire, one of Tapie's former businesses, is a chain of health product stores. It sponsored one of the strongest cycling teams of all time, La Vie Claire, which was founded after the 1983 European cycling season, when multiple Tour de France winner Bernard Hinault had acrimoniously broken away from the Renault–Elf–Gitane team. Hinault and Greg LeMond won successive Tours with the La Vie Claire team in 1985 and 1986. From 1986 to 1994, Tapie was the president of the Marseille football club, which became champions of France five times in a row (from 1989 to 1993) and won the 1992–93 UEFA Champions League. In 1985, Tapie bought the sailing ship Club Méditerrannée from the wife of disappeared French navigator Alain Colas. The boat was transported to Marseille, where Tapie had his football team, and restored for two years. It was renamed Phocea and was at that time the longest sailing ship in the world (70 m or 225 ft). Tapie took command of it with a new crew in 1988 and broke the world record for crossing the Atlantic Ocean. In 2021, Tapie and his wife were severely beaten in a home invasion robbery. ... Source: Article "Bernard Tapie" from Wikipedia in English, licensed under CC-BY-SA.