The Bobigny Commercial Court on Thursday declared the liquidation of Bernard Tapie's companies, rejecting his repayment plan of the 400 million euros to which he was condemned in the case of the arbitration of his dispute with Credit Lyonnais, according to the judgment consulted by AFP.
The financing of the reimbursement proposed by the businessman is "not assured", ruled the court, whose decision can still be appealed. Consequently, he pronounced the liquidation 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.
A victory for the creditors of Tapie
This decision paves the way for the sale of the businessman's goods, who announced in March that he had signed a sales agreement for the Hôtel de Cavoye, his Parisian residence which he estimates at 90 million euros, to finance its 3rd repayment plan.
It is a new victory for the creditors who have tried unsuccessfully since 2015 to obtain the return of the sums awarded by the arbitration rendered in 2008, deemed fraudulent and which was supposed to settle the dispute between Bernard Tapie and Crédit Lyonnais in the Adidas resale business in 1993.
But the former boss of Olympique de Marseille, who is fighting at 77 against metastasized cancer, has repeated it several times: even in the event of liquidation, his creditors would not, according to him, touch any euro as long as the amount the exact details of his debt, the subject of fierce procedural battles, have not been definitively settled. In the last episode, on February 28, the Paris Court of Appeal ruled that this debt amounted to 438 million euros. Bernard Tapie's lawyer has however announced a cassation appeal.
"Judicial liquidation was the only appropriate procedure", says CDR
"We have consistently demonstrated that the three successive drafts of backup and recovery plans presented by Bernard Tapie were unrealistic (...) and that compulsory liquidation was therefore the only appropriate procedure for achieving the sale of the assets in with a view to repaying at least part of the debts, "reacted in a press release François Lemasson, the president of the Consortium of realization (CDR). This entity, responsible for the heritage of Crédit Lyonnais, estimates that the Tapie spouses owe it more than 550 million euros.
In criminal proceedings, Bernard Tapie was acquitted in July 2019 of the accusation of fraud in the arbitration case, but the Paris prosecutor's office has appealed and a second trial is to take place.