Outwardly, there may be little or no that’s flashy in regards to the L’Oreal magnificence big heiress who has simply turn out to be the primary lady to amass a $100 billion fortune.
The household agency owns manufacturers together with Prada and Yves Saint Laurent, in addition to Lancome.
But French businesswoman Francoise Bettencourt Meyers, granddaughter of the L’Oreal founder, and now the world’s richest lady, has a extra understated type.
The 70-year-old’s favoured equipment are a pair of huge, heavy-rimmed glasses and a brilliant scarf, usually worn with a sensible trouser go well with.
Save for a slick of black eyeliner, she wears little make-up, and when not coping with business affairs she writes books.
Not glamorous, escapist fiction, however heavy tomes together with 5 volumes of A Look At The Bible and one other tackling Greek mythology.
She does, nevertheless, have one notable indulgence: two grand pianos, a Steinway and a Yamaha, which take delight of place in her elegant two-storey condominium within the rich Paris suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine.
The piano, it will appear, has been a lifelong outlet for this low-profile member of the tiny group of people who can actually name themselves mega-rich (her $100.2 billion fortune places her at twelfth in Bloomberg’s Billionaire Index).
Francoise started enjoying as a baby, having classes from Yvonne Lefebure — a girl who counted the composers Faure and Ravel amongst her buddies — on the unique Marymount School, in Paris, run by American nuns.
She hit the $100 billion-dollar milestone after shares within the agency, based by her grandfather Eugene Schueller in 1909, hit a document excessive.
But her standing because the world’s richest lady was inherited from her mom Liliane Bettencourt, the glamorous grand dame of the sweetness conglomerate, who died, at 94, in 2017.
As low profile as Francoise could like to stay, Liliane’s dying dropped at a detailed a chapter in Bettencourt historical past that would rival TV’s Succession for rivalry, in-fighting and drama.
What started as a household row over love and cash and the vulnerability of an ageing matriarch, developed into an explosive wrangle that captured headlines and spiralled right into a political scandal, involving allegations of tax evasion and unlawful donations to the previous French president Nicolas Sarkozy.
The “Affaire Bettencourt” (it was so seismic it had its personal title) has not too long ago been became a three-part Netflix documentary.
The story of Francoise Bettencourt Meyers is marked out by the lengthy shadow solid by her mom Liliane, who had a robust bond along with her personal father, a chemist who started his business by manufacturing and promoting artificial hair dyes to Parisian salons.
Her mom died when she was 5, and Liliane first went to work for L’Oreal at 15, sticking labels on shampoo bottles in a manufacturing unit.
She inherited the L’Oreal empire when her father died in 1957, however working the corporate fell to a person, the corporate’s CEo Francois Dalle, and for many of Liliane’s 9 many years she was higher recognized for who she was than what she did.
Married to Andre Bettencourt, a authorities minister of the Nineteen Sixties and Seventies below President Charles de Gaulle, Liliane’s was a lifetime of luxurious.
She even purchased an island within the Seychelles.
Francoise, an solely baby, was born in 1953 — however the mother-daughter relationship was put below pressure from the beginning, when Liliane contracted tuberculosis and needed to depart her toddler daughter whereas she recovered in a sanatorium.
Later, little Francoise was withdrawn from college and educated at house as a result of her mother and father had been suffering from fears she could be kidnapped and held for ransom.
Her piano was a solace.
Of her choice for solitude over glitzy events, she mentioned: “I have always loved moments shared between friends, in small groups, that’s how the best friendship is created. I still don’t like big dinners, I prefer cosy brunches.”
In his 2017 e book The Bettencourt Affair, journalist Tom Sancton displays that Francoise was by no means comfy along with her standing as heiress and wealthy lady, and couldn’t have been much less like her enthusiastic socialite mom.
She, nevertheless, has at all times insisted they had been as soon as a really “close-knit family”.
Sancton’s e book quotes childhood buddy Arielle Dombasle: “Francoise doesn’t like luxury. She likes her Labrador. She adores her children and she loves her husband.”
Born and raised a Catholic, Francoise met the person who would turn out to be her husband at simply 19.
Jean Pierre-Meyers was 5 years older, the son of a L’Oreal supervisor, from a rich French Jewish banking household.
The couple opted for a quiet marriage ceremony in Tuscany, Italy, with simply 9 visitors in whole (“We didn’t get married in secret,” insisted Francoise), adopted by a bigger reception again house in France.
Five years later it emerged that each her maternal grandfather, Eugene Schueller, and her father, Andre Bettencourt, had labored for the extreme-Right, anti-Semitic La Cagoule motion earlier than World War II.
Did this gasoline ill-feeling?
It definitely could have executed.
Francoise’s husband Jean-Pierre is the grandson of a rabbi who was murdered at Auschwitz and the couple have two youngsters, Jean-Victor and Nicolas Meyers, who had been raised Jewish. (L’Oreal, stays a household business; each Jean-Victor, 37, and Nicolas, 35, are on the L’Oreal board. When he changed his grandmother on the board of administrators, Jean-Victor was 25, making him the youngest director of a publicly listed firm in France.)
Whatever awkwardness could have been created, Francoise remained near her father till his dying in 2007 and the {couples}’ respective houses in Neuilly-sur-Seine had been only a stone’s throw aside.
It was quickly after her father’s dying that Francoise accused considered one of her mom’s closest buddies, the society photographer Francois-Marie Banier, of manipulating the aged widow into lavishing him with items price greater than $1.8 billion, together with artworks, money and life insurance coverage insurance policies.
She argued that her octogenarian mom was mentally unfit and being manipulated by her entourage, notably Banier.
The row exploded right into a political scandal in 2010 when it emerged Liliane’s butler had secretly taped a lot of her conversations.
The recordings, revealed that Liliane held greater than $186.9 million in secret Swiss financial institution accounts, an undeclared island within the Seychelles, discussions about numerous tax evasion methods and had ties to Sarkozy’s authorities.
In 2015 eight members of the previous girl’s entourage, together with Banier, had been convicted of fleecing her.
Banier was convicted of “abuse of weakness”, sentenced to 2 and a half years in jail and ordered to pay $295.3 million in damages.
He appealed, and his conviction was upheld however his sentence and superb had been diminished Liliane, in the meantime, was dominated to be affected by dementia and positioned below the management of her daughter and two grandsons, a destiny which she had declared could be her “worst nightmare”.
They had been in the end reconciled.
Francoise mentioned earlier than her mom’s dying: “I have always been close to my parents and perhaps more so to my mother. My father was in politics and was often absent, but she was the bridge.”
“I saw her constantly, before some people interfered in our life and our relationship to change things.”
Since her mom’s dying, Francoise has lower a dignified determine, her lengthy black hair unmarked by gray.
In his e book, Tom Sancton describes her as a low-key lady who “lives inside her own cocoon”.
While she has served on L’Oreal’s board of administrators since 1997 and is chairwoman of the household holding firm (the household holds a 33 per cent stake within the agency), Francoise isn’t solely centered on the business.
She can be president of her household’s philanthropic basis, which helps French endeavours within the sciences and humanities.
She pledged $323 million to restore efforts after the hearth ravaged Notre Dame Cathedral in 2019.
Above all, although, the richest lady on the earth is happiest not surrounded by luxurious and sycophants — however on the keys of her piano.
Source: www.perthnow.com.au
