The Bobigny Commercial Court ordered the liquidation of Bernard Tapie's companies on Thursday 30 April, rejecting his repayment plan of more than 400 million euros to which he was condemned in the case of the arbitration of his dispute with Crédit Lyonnais, according to the judgment consulted by AFP.
Read also: A plan to save Tapie companies rejected on appeal
The financing of the plan 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.
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.
Procedural battles
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 case of the resale of Adidas 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 touch , according to him, no euro until the exact amount of his debt, the object of bitter procedural battles, has 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. Tapie's lawyer has however announced a cassation appeal. “ We have consistently demonstrated that the three successive projects for safeguard 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.
