Motion to block L’Oreal estate trial lacks foundation: Court

L’Oreal SA heiress Liliane Bettencourt, Europe’s wealthiest woman, lost a bid to block her daughter’s private prosecution of a man to whom Bettencourt gave almost 1 billion euros ($1.4 billion) in gifts.

A criminal court near Paris today denied Bettencourt’s claim that Judge Isabelle Prevost-Desprez showed bias in allowing Francoise Bettencourt-Meyers’s complaint against the man to go forward over prosecutors’ objections. Meyers, Bettencourt’s daughter, said Francois-Marie Banier took advantage of her 87-year-old mother’s mental “frailty,” when accepting gifts from her.

A court “must be both independent and impartial,” Bettencourt’s lawyer, Georges Kiejman, told the judges. “You can’t deny that there is a conflict” between the local public prosecutor and the local court.

The judges refused the request and said the trial would begin July 1.

Meyers’s case against Banier, a photographer, author and painter, revealed a rift in one of France’s most powerful families. Bettencourt’s father founded L’Oreal, the world’s biggest cosmetics company, and she is its largest shareholder. Forbes Magazine estimated her wealth at $13.4 billion, making her France’s second-richest person after Bernard Arnault, chief executive officer of LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton SA.

Banier’s lawyer, Herve Temime, has said the gifts, including artworks, real estate and life insurance policies on Bettencourt which named Banier as beneficiary, were willingly offered while the heiress was lucid. The two met in 1969 and the gifts were given starting in 1995, according to a December interview of Banier that appeared in Le Monde.

Banier could face as much as three years in prison and a fine of 375,000 euros if found guilty. Meyers is acting to protect her mother from “a predator” and isn’t seeking the return of any of the gifts, her lawyer has said.

Meyers initially asked French prosecutors in Nanterre to investigate the case. After the inquiry remained in the preliminary stages for 18 months, Meyers brought her own case. Prosecutors eventually dropped their probe. In France, a private citizen can directly initiate a criminal prosecution.

Banier’s lawyer, Temime, didn’t support the effort to block the trial and said the photographer “wants to be judged and asks to be judged.”

Bettencourt refused a court-ordered medical examination to gauge her mental fitness, saying the court should rely on medical records provided by her personal physician.

The matter won’t affect the Bettencourt family’s 30 percent stake in L’Oreal or an agreement with Nestle SA, which controls about 29 percent of the cosmetics company, not to increase its stake until six months after the heiress’s death, according to a March statement by Meyers.