Tuesday, December 24, 2002. A man in a tan trench coat emerges from the Saint-Sulpice Métro station, crosses the square, and heads down the rue Servandoni. He stops in front of a pair of dark-green doors and presses the bell. A female employee escorts him to a narrow elevator that takes him to the fourth floor, where François-Marie Banier is waiting for him. The table is set for two. In the adjoining kitchen, Banier’s cook prepares to serve lunch.
The visitor is an unassuming man of average height, sixty-six years old, with receding gray hair and wire-rimmed glasses. He could pass for an accountant, or perhaps an insurance adjustor. His name is Pierre Castres Saint Martin, but everyone knows him as Pascal because he was born on Easter Day in 1936. Today is the eve of another Christian feast day, but Castres is not here to bring tidings of comfort and joy. He is here to scare the hell out of Banier.
The two men know each other well. Castres is the financial adviser to Liliane Bettencourt and director of the family holding companies that manage her L’Oréal shares and investments. Before that, he spent two decades at L’Oréal, serving as legal director, financial director, and finally deputy director-general, the number two behind CEO Lindsay Owen-Jones. Since his retirement in 2002, he worked exclusively for Liliane Bettencourt. It was at her urging that Castres met periodically with Banier to advise him on how to manage the substantial funds she had shoveled his way. The two men had lunched together at Banier’s home several times before.
Banier had even offered to give him one of his paintings. Castres declined. “It was a modern painting, enormous,” he explains. “I didn’t know what to do with it.”
Castres knew that Banier had received numerous gifts from Liliane over the years, but he was unaware of the extent until the day that she asked him to examine her will and see that everything was in order. “Please show him all the documents concerning my succession,” she wrote to her notary, Jean-Michel Normand. “I have absolute confidence in him and his discretion.” When Castres pored over the papers at Normand’s office, he was shocked to discover that Madame Bettencourt had made Banier the beneficiary on four life-insurance policies whose accrued value now reached some €625 million. Apart from the notary, no one, not even André, knew that the policies had been put in Banier’s name. Castres dashed back to the rue Delabordère.
“Madame, this is madness,” he told Liliane. “All of these dispositions will be contested.” The day her will would be unsealed, he warned, her daughter’s family would almost certainly sue Banier for captation d’héritage—illegally appropriating an inheritance. In place of the insurance policies, he proposed to offer Banier lifetime annuities, regular stipends for as long as he lived. That way, at least, the will would not be challenged. Castres proposed to talk to Banier and try to reason him into renouncing the policies. “She gave me her permission, and I went to discuss the matter with him.”
No sooner than Castres sat down at Banier’s table, he cut to the chase: “You’re mad to seek such sums from Liliane.”
Banier played innocent. “I never asked for anything. As far as the insurance policies are concerned, I wasn’t even aware of them. I’ve just learned about it.”
“One day Madame will be dead and you will be alone,” Castres warned. “After she’s gone, you will be sued over the succession.”
But legal action was not the only threat. Nicole Gilbert, Banier’s cook, recalled overhearing Castres’s chilling scenarios of violent retribution. “He was trembling with rage as he spoke . . . Concerning the life-insurance policies, he said that the Mafia would be aware of what was going to be paid out to you and you will be obliged to give it all to them, that they would use whatever means necessary, first against those close to you, then to make you disappear they would plunge you into an acid bath.” Banier says Castres told him he would wind up at the bottom of the Seine, alongside Martin d’Orgeval and Pascal Greggory, with their “feet in concrete.”
Castres denies that he ever mentioned acid baths or concrete shoes, but he does admit making dire threats. “It’s true I told him that he risked being threatened by the Mafia the day there would be a suit against him, because there were unscrupulous people who could be interested in recovering what he had obtained. Nothing more. I didn’t go further than that.” His aim, he says, was to “scare him” and “bring him to reason.”
Castres succeeded in his immediate goal: His threats put the fear of God into Banier and nearly pushed him to the edge of madness. Banier immediately dashed off a fax to Liliane telling her what had happened. He was sure that Castres had been sent by Françoise and Jean-Pierre Meyers to frighten him into renouncing Liliane’s gifts.
Liliane, who was vacationing on the Île d’Arros with André, sent a return fax urging Banier to keep calm. But she railed against her daughter and son-in-law, whom she suspected of being behind Castres’s intimidation tactics.
“Castres told you he was linked with the Chapon,” she wrote, using her favorite nickname for her son-in-law—a chapon being a castrated rooster. “You believe it or is it to annoy you a little more [?] I send you a big kiss, and please put this incident out of your head.” In a separate fax, she wrote: “I see red when people don’t behave well with me. . . . The jealousy of the other one [Françoise] is a gross jealousy, a real bitch of a jealousy, and badly expressed. So much the better. I send you a tender kiss. This is going to be amusing.”
Banier was not amused. “This incident with Castres drove me mad,” he says. “I went to the Bourdelle Museum one Sunday with Martin and I saw all the paintings advancing toward me, like in The Exorcist. And that’s when I knew what madness is. I was so afraid that I wanted to throw myself in front of cars, I saw cars driving into my house, I saw abominable things.” Banier was tempted to file a suit against Castres, but Liliane begged him not to, fearing a scandal that would damage the image of L’Oréal. The company, which had gone public in 1963, was by then the world’s leading cosmetics firm, a flagship of the French beauty and luxury industry that carefully guarded its shareholder confidence.
Liliane’s own countermove marked a dramatic turn in the conflict that pitted her devotion to Banier against the interests of her heirs. After her return to Paris in January 2003, she reaffirmed her testamentary gifts in a letter to her notary, citing “the affection that I have for François-Marie Banier and my gratitude for all that I owe him,” and insisting that her legacies in his favor could not be “contested by anyone whosoever.” She stipulated that if her daughter attempted to prevent the carrying out of Liliane’s dispositions toward Banier, Françoise’s share of the estate would be attributed 50-50 to Banier and the Pasteur Institute.
Meanwhile, she wrote Banier a reassuring letter about her intentions toward him and her daughter:
My dear François-Marie, I am leaving a considerable fortune to my daughter—and on top of that I have paid the taxes on it all. In no case should you feel indebted to her. . . . I am happy to have been able to help you in your work and in your life. From the day we first met, we have given enormously to one another.
And that has helped me a lot in difficult moments and even in business.
—
Liliane went further in arming Banier against a future attack by her daughter and son-in-law. “I am sending you the correspondence I have had with Normand,” she wrote to Banier in January 2003, “and I authorize you to make use of it if my heirs have the bad taste to attack you.” She closed, as she often did, with “Haut les cœurs!” When Banier received these precious documents, he carefully classified them in folders and kept them at the ready.
What is extraordinary in all this is that, long before the so-called Bettencourt Affair erupted, Liliane had assumed an adversarial position with respect to her own heirs. She correctly anticipated the likelihood that Françoise and Jean-Pierre would one day take action against Banier. And she clearly sided with Banier against them—even advising her friend to hire a lawyer to “secure” the donations. Moreover, it was Liliane who insisted that Banier formally accept the insurance policies in spite of Castres’s attempts to intimidate him. And this at a time when no one questioned Liliane’s lucidity or powers of discernment.
Under French law, the subscriber of an assurance vie, or life-insurance policy, is free to change the beneficiary by modifying his or her will. It is the testamentary document itself that identifies who will inherit the policy. But once the subscriber formally designates a beneficiary to the insurance company, and the beneficiary officially accepts the policy, it can no longer be changed. In order to “lock in” Banier’s claim, Liliane declared him as beneficiary on two of the contracts that bore his name and instructed him to formalize his acceptance with the companies in March 2003. He immediately did so for one contract, but waited more than a year, after a chiding letter from Liliane, to accept the second. (Liliane’s will also named Banier as the beneficiary of a third contract, though it was never declared to the company.)
As for Castres, his ill-fated attempt to frighten Banier led to his downfall. “I well understood that [Banier] had told Madame Bettencourt to get rid of me,” he says, looking back on the episode more than a decade later. So in October 2004, he handed in his resignation. On the recommendation of Lindsay Owen-Jones, he was replaced by Patrice de Maistre, a L’Oréal auditor—a man who would play a major role in Liliane’s inner circle, and not always for the good.
Before he took his leave, Castres made it a point to inform André of the exact circumstances of his departure. “I told him that I could not remain in the presence of someone like that who was too close to Madame Bettencourt.” André “simply took note” but did not react. “He wasn’t involved because it was Madame who managed her fortune. She was the master of it, not him.” As the years wore on, and Liliane’s payouts mounted into the tens and hundreds of millions, André would be informed of the situation by more than one interlocutor. Not once did he react.
The Castres incident possibly marks the moment when Françoise and Jean-Pierre Meyers became more fully aware of Liliane’s prodigality toward her protégé. Up until that point, they had no way to know about Liliane’s real estate dealings with Banier, or the checks she cut him, or the paintings she had reserved for him in her will. Banier is convinced that Castres informed the couple about the four life-insurance policies (one of which had actually been switched from Françoise’s name to Banier’s) and was sent by them to intimidate him. “The real reason behind the suit against me is in the visit by Castres at Christmas 2002,” he says. “He blackmailed me with a death threat so I would give up the insurance policies.”
Castres admits that he was friendly with the Meyerses during his days at L’Oréal, but he denies acting on their behalf or even informing them about the policies. If only Banier had accepted his offer of annuities in place of the policies, he says, there wouldn’t have been any suit. “He didn’t realize the risk he was running, so I tried to make him understand. I know it’s incredible all the things I told him, that he’d have the Mafia on his back and all that. I just said any old thing, but it didn’t work.”