But the 77-year-old businessman repeated it several times: even in the event of liquidation, his creditors would not, according to him, receive any euro as long as the exact amount of his debt, the subject of bitter procedural battles, will not have been decided.
>> READ. The illness, the mistakes of the past, the conflicts of today … The truth interview with Bernard Tapie in Var-matin
In the meantime, the Bobigny Commercial Court must render its decision on Thursday after examining on October 30 a plan for judicial recovery of the companies GBT (Groupe Bernard Tapie), majority shareholder of the media group La Provence, and FIBT (Financière et Immobilière Bernard Tapie), which owns its Parisian mansion and its villa in Saint-Tropez.
The prosecution and creditors asked the court to find that the companies were in default, that recovery was impossible and required a liquidation to seize the assets.
The deliberation period of the court is however regularly extended in this matter.
This commercial procedure is one of the aspects of the Tapie-Crédit Lyonnais affair, a soap opera that has pitted the businessman against the former public bank for 26 years.
This commercial aspect dates back to December 2015. On that date, the Paris Court of Appeal ordered Mr. Tapie to reimburse, with interest, the approximately 404 million euros granted by arbitration in this case, including 45 million in respect of non-pecuniary damage.
This private sentence of 2008, supposed to settle its litigation with the Lyonnais in the case of the resale of Adidas in 1993, had previously been judged fraudulent and canceled by the civil justice.
In criminal proceedings, however, Bernard Tapie was released in July from the accusation of fraud, but the Paris prosecutor’s office appealed.
On the reimbursement side, the former minister, who is fighting metastasized cancer today, has made several commitments to return the money, but only once established the amount of his debt, which he disputes.
Four years after the conviction, the Consortium de Réalisation (CDR), the entity responsible for the inheritance of Crédit Lyonnais and main creditor of Mr. Tapie, did not touch anything.
On the eve of the court of appeal’s decision, the former boss of Olympique de Marseille, himself in personal bankruptcy since the 1990s, had placed his companies, which hold all of his property, under the protection of bankruptcy law.
>> READ. Bernard Tapie: “I am a guinea pig, I have been experimenting with a new treatment for a month”
Planed claim
In June 2017, the Paris Commercial Court had unexpectedly approved a first plan to save these companies, spreading payments over six years from 2018.
But the CDR and the public prosecutor’s office obtained on appeal the cancellation of this plan for “lack of financing”.
As for the initial approval of the plan, it was the subject of judicial information opened in August 2017 and still in progress, for suspicions of “judgment swindle”.
In a second version, Mr. Tapie agreed to sell the Hôtel de Cavoye, his Parisian residence which he estimates at 90 million euros, and if necessary the Villa Mandala in Saint-Tropez, from which he hopes to draw 75 million.
But the Paris Commercial Court rejected this second plan in mid-January 2019, estimating the overvalued assets.
At the same time, searches were carried out at the Commercial Court, at its president and at Mr. Tapie’s, at the request of the magistrate in charge of the investigation for “swindle”.
Denouncing this situation, Bernard Tapie obtained a change of scenery from the Bobigny procedure.
On Thursday, lawyers for Mr. Tapie and the CDR will also meet at the Paris Court of Appeal, which is to examine the businessman’s appeal against the rejection of his second plan, which he still hopes to have approved. .
But how much does Bernard Tapie really owe?
In April 2019, the CDR assessed its receivable from the Tapie spouses at 525 million euros, including the interest that is still outstanding.
But the Tapie clan, which considers that it has in reality not touched more than 190 million euros in arbitration, disputes this calculation, attempting in a procedural millefeuille to reduce the liabilities to zero.
A first court decision in his favor thus reduced the debt of CDR by 117 million euros, which appealed and awaits a decision on February 25.
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