France’s richest woman, Liliane Bettencourt, filed a police complaint against her daughter on Friday over the release of tapes reportedly revealing that the L’Oreal heiress conspired to evade taxes.
Ms Bettencourt’s ex-butler allegedly secretly recorded conversations between the 87-year-old heiress and her financial adviser that were later handed over to the billionaire’s daughter. Francoise Bettencourt-Meyers, who has been waging a bitter court battle against her mother over her handling of the family fortune, is accused of violation of privacy, theft and perjury, said the mother’s lawyer George Kiejman. Kiejman charged that the butler was working for Bettencourt-Meyers. “We can assume that there was an espionage ring put in place for the benefit of and at the behest of her daughter,” he said.
The French police arrested the ex-butler on Wednesday and a computer expert was later detained for questioning over the tapes recorded between May 2009 and May 2010 in Bettencourt’s villa in the posh suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine. The butler’s tapes are the latest twist in a long-running family feud between the billionaire and her daughter, who claims Bettencourt is mentally unfit after she gave lavish gifts to a photographer-friend.
The photographer, Francois-Marie Banier, goes on trial in July to answer charges that he took advantage of the heiress to the L’Oreal cosmetics fortune for receiving gifts worth one billion euros. According to the Mediapart website, the recordings reveal that Bettencourt hid 80 million euros in Swiss accounts that her financial adviser planned to move following a Franco-Swiss tax cooperation accord.