Dominique Tapie finds herself widowed and ruined but must repay 600 million debts. All the property of the Tapie couple seized, she had to leave the mansion on rue des Saints-Pères.
Widowed, Dominique Tapie is now ruined. After the disappearance of her husband, Bernard Tapie, on October 3, 2021, a new ordeal fell on her. The wife of the businessman must now repay the 600 million debts under which the couple had been crumbling for several years. If the financial and legal problems of Bernard Tapie were known to all and in particular to his wife, she did not know the extent of the amounts to be settled. Sophie Des Déserts author of the survey of Paris Match at the origin of the revelations this February 10, specified the day before on the set of C to you that “until the end Bernard Tapie thought he could reverse the course of justice” and put his wife to safety. The businessman, sentenced in civil in 2015 to repay 400 million euros in the Lyonnais credit case, was awaiting a criminal judgment and hoped for a release. His wife had been jointly and severally condemned and her fate also depended on the new judgment.
The couple’s fortune could have come to the aid of Dominique Tapie to repay part of the debts but “there is nothing left of the heritage which nourished the Tapie legend”, explains the journalist. All the couple’s real estate was seized pending criminal trial and “they didn’t even have a credit card or checkbook anymore”. How then Dominique and Bernard Tapie managed to give the illusion that the good life resumed? This is the question that all creditors ask themselves.
Dominique Tapie relocated by Jean-Louis Borloo
Dominique Tapie is forced to leave the mansion on rue des Saints-Pères, in which she has lived for 35 years with her husband. The property seized, Bernard Tapie had sold it to François Pinault, who is now asking the widow to move. The woman who remained dignified and discreet all her life alongside her husband could count on the faithful friends of the family like Jean-Louis Borloo. The Paris-Match investigation indicates that the former minister has found an apartment to house Dominique Tapie. The siblings of the Tapie children once again appear very united and supportive behind their mother. A friend Dominique Tapie confides in the eight-page investigation that the businessman’s wife remains “valiant” as she has always been during her husband’s many legal battles: “She tries to be a philosopher , says that we have to start all over again but it’s a nightmare. Everything went up in smoke”.
Where did the Tapie couple’s fortune go?
“It was a couple who lived on a high train in appearance”, explained Sophie Des Déserts on BFM TV but behind the scenes they weren’t rolling in gold. Bernard Tapie had been deprived of all his bank accounts with the exception of one which made it possible to finance the local press title, La Provence, of which the businessman was the owner. This account could have been used to “pay personal expenses” but it could not finance the couple’s lifestyle. The creditors of Bernard and Dominique Tapie “believed in the existence of a hidden hoard” on which the couple relied to stay afloat. The reality is very far from all these assumptions. The survey reveals that Dominique Tapie would only live with the monthly €450 of his retirement.
Dominique Tapie mourning the death of her husband
The death of Bernard Tapie, on October 3, 2021, aroused a wave of emotion in the country, thousands of reactions, testifying to the feeling of affection or fascination that the businessman caused in public opinion. His wife, Dominique, was at his bedside when he died: it was the press release sent by the family, to announce the death, which made this indiscretion public on Sunday. It is not a surprise, Dominique Tapie was for nearly half a century the shoulder on which Bernard Tapie could rest. The last days of September, she had to resolve to lose the one who had become her alter-ego, as reported on October 4, Jean-Louis Borloo, a close friend of the family, on BFMTV. “I heard him whisper to Dominique, I think, ‘it’s over’. I think he felt death coming for the first time,” he told Jean-Jacques Bourdin’s microphone. A few days after the death of the businessman, Stéphane Tapie gave some news of his mother-in-law Dominique, on RTL. “She spent fifty years of her life by his side, that’s not nothing. And fifty years by his side, that’s even less so. […] Obviously she is affected, but the clan is united around her“.