Bernard Tapie, वह फ्रांसीसी उद्यमी जिसे फ्रांस ने प्यार किया और अदालतों ने नहीं छोड़ा

Bernard Tapie

Photo: Gind2005 / CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

जन्म	26 जनवरी 1943 20th arrondissement of Paris
निधन	3 अक्टूबर 2021 (78)
पेशा	उद्यमी, राजनेता और खेल क्लब के मालिक
पुरस्कार	u0938u093eu0932 u0915u093e u092fu0942u0930u094bu092au0940u092f

The charges against him were real. The prison sentence was served. The €404 million arbitration award was real too, for a time, until it wasn’t. What made Bernard Tapie singular in French public life was not his capacity for reinvention — plenty of people remake themselves — but his stubborn insistence that the system was rigged against him, and the fact that the courts kept alternating between agreeing with him and ordering him to pay.

He grew up in Seine-Saint-Denis, the northern belt of Paris suburbs that has produced, in roughly equal measure, some of France’s finest athletes and some of its most spectacular bankruptcies. His father repaired refrigerators. Tapie did not wait for inheritance; in the late 1970s, he began buying companies that nobody else wanted — a printer here, a battery manufacturer there — restructuring them and moving on. The pattern would repeat itself, on an ever-larger scale, for the next twenty years.

In 1990, he bought Adidas for approximately 1.6 billion francs, financed through a syndicate led by Crédit Lyonnais. The brand was struggling: manufacturing costs were hemorrhaging, the identity was blurred, and Nike had taken the market position that Adidas once considered its birthright. Tapie shifted production to Asia, redesigned the distribution network, brought in Bob Strasser, a former Nike executive, to rebuild the marketing function, and sold the company in 1993. By 1995, Adidas was listed on the stock exchange at eleven billion francs. What happened to the margin between purchase and listing would occupy the French legal system for the next quarter century.

The same years made Olympique de Marseille something it had never been before and has not been since. He bought the club in 1986 when it was a provincial concern and turned it, within three years, into the dominant force in French football. Four consecutive Ligue 1 championships. And then, on a May night in Munich in 1993, the first and still the only Champions League title won by a French club. The stadium held 64,000 people. Marseille felt, that night, like a city that had briefly reordered the continental hierarchy.

The victory was contaminated before the confetti settled. That same spring, a Ligue 1 match between OM and Valenciennes had been fixed — a mid-table game thrown to protect key players for the European final. A Valenciennes defender had received cash before the match. Tapie was implicated, tried, and in 1995 sentenced to two years, eight months of which were non-suspended. He served 165 days. The French football federation stripped OM of its league championship and relegated the club to the second division. The Champions League title was not stripped — it was won on the field in Germany by players whose abilities were not in question — but the institutional shadow has never lifted.

The Crédit Lyonnais affair ran on a parallel track and reached a grimmer conclusion for the bank. Tapie had alleged that the bank, acting as his financial advisor, had engineered the Adidas sale to benefit itself — using offshore structures to acquire the company without disclosing the conflict of interest, and deliberately underselling it to a buyer, Robert Louis-Dreyfus, who then listed it at six times the acquisition price. In 2008, a special judicial panel awarded Tapie €404 million from the French state. The decision was contested by the Socialist government that came to power in 2012; in 2015, a French court ordered the money returned. The affair had consumed Christine Lagarde’s tenure as finance minister, the careers of several judges, and the better part of Tapie’s later years. He died with the question still formally unresolved.

The mid-1990s, which for most people would have constituted an ending, were for Tapie a kind of enforced pivot. Bankruptcy made him ineligible for his previous pursuits. He walked, in 1995, into a Claude Lelouch film — Hommes, femmes: mode d’emploi — opposite Fabrice Luchini, and discovered that the skills required to command a boardroom were not entirely different from the skills required to hold a camera’s attention. The theatre production of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, in which he played the McMurphy role that Jack Nicholson had made famous, earned the kind of reviews that surprised people expecting stunt casting. The TV series Valence, in which he played a police chief across four seasons, ran until 2005.

In 2018, he was diagnosed with stomach and esophageal cancer — a diagnosis he made public, and treated, in characteristically Tapie fashion, as a fight worth documenting. He underwent chemotherapy and experimental treatments in France and Belgium and gave interviews about the process with the same combative candor he had applied to everything else. He was still in the middle of it when, months before his death, he and his wife were beaten in a violent home invasion at their Paris residence. He died on October 3, 2021, aged 78. Emmanuel Macron called his ambition, energy, and enthusiasm a source of inspiration for generations of French people. The Olympique de Marseille supporters, who had found reasons to love him even when the courts were finding reasons to imprison him, called him simply le boss.

The Netflix biographical limited series Tapie, released in 2023, found in his story what French public life could never quite settle on: whether he was a visionary who broke the rules because he judged the rules insufficient, or a man whose appetites consistently exceeded his ethics. The series attracted significant viewership in France. The question it raised did not get a cleaner answer on screen than it had in court. That, in the end, may be the most Tapie-like outcome possible: a verdict that declined to become final.

टैग: ceos, व्यापार, Adidas, Bernard Tapie, La Vie Claire, Olympique de Marseille