¿Haaland por Mbappé en el PSG?
Mbappé does not enter the core of PSG
Successful businessman, sports leader, minister, singer, television host, actor... but also the protagonist of long legal problems that landed him in jail. Bernard Tapie, who died this Sunday at the age of 78, had a life marked by extremes.
Born in 1943 in Paris in the bosom of a working family (his father was a milling worker), he studied electronic engineering and as a young man already showed a desire to achieve fame, trying unsuccessfully as a singer under the name of Bernard Tapy.
He also tried it as a motorsport driver, in Formula 3, a path he abandoned after suffering a serious accident. He worked in various companies in the electronics sector until in 1979 he founded his own firm, Groupe Bernard Tapie (GBT), dedicated to buying bankrupt companies, cleaning them up and selling them with capital gains. Well-known companies passed through his hands, such as the first private television channel in France (TF1) or the manufacturer of rackets Donnay, but the most important, and which ended up being the source of his misfortunes, was Adidas, a German clothing and sports teams of which in 1990 took over 78%.
In the mid-eighties he began to be invited to television programs. His exuberant personality and his spontaneity made him a popular entertainer across the country, especially among the youth. Passionate about sports, in 1984 he created the "La Vie Claire" cycling team, with which the French star Bernard Hinault won his fifth Tour de France and his third Giro d'Italia.
In 1986, he went on to control Olympique de Marseille. OM was the team with the longest tradition in France, but it was in low hours and Tapie, as president, revived it by signing great French and foreign players.
In 1991, OM reached the final of the then European Cup, although they lost to Red Star Belgrade, but in 1993 they became champions -the first French team to do so- against the powerful AC Milan. Tapie took a good part of the national glory.
@inezrussell I have a gas stove so I was able to make breakfast but I just heated some iced tea I had in the fridge… https://t.co/oh08T9SK7H
— Faith Thu Dec 10 15:39:21 +0000 2020
He also excelled in politics. Encouraged by the socialist president François Mitterrand, in 1988 he stood for the legislature and was elected an independent deputy. In February 1992, he was appointed Minister of Town Planning, a position from which he resigned a month later to defend himself against a complaint from a former partner, although he returned in December.
In 1993 he was elected deputy for the Movement of Left Radicals (MRG) and a year later he led the formation's candidacy for the European Parliament. His list came second nationally and he was one of its MEPs. But he had to leave politics because of his growing legal problems. First, Adidas was seized in 1992 and attributed to the Crédit Lyonnais bank, which was then public.
The bank sold it to a French industrialist and Tapie asked the State for compensation, considering that he had been unfairly deprived of the capital gains from the operation. From there began a real judicial labyrinth. 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 assets seized for an alleged favorable treatment.
Adidas was his main legal embroilment but not the only one: in 1994 he was prohibited from performing any managerial role at Olympique de Marseille due to financial and sporting irregularities during his management.
And in 1996 he was accused of bankruptcy in a summary related to the management of his companies FIBT and GBT. He was in prison from February to July 1997. In 2001 he was able to briefly return to OM, in which he clashed 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 made his debut with no less than the famous director Claude Lelouch, continued with telefilms, starred in a series of television and the play "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest".
He was married twice and had three children. Tapie himself summarized his intense life in 2013 in the newspaper Le Parisien: "I have known all environments: business, entertainment, sport. But none is as repugnant as politics."
Stomach cancer, announced in 2017, removed him from the front line and, despite operations and treatments, it progressively spread to other organs and ultimately cost him his life.
