Liliane Bettencourt, heiress to the L’Oreal cosmetics empire and the world’s wealthiest woman, has died at the age of 94, the company announced on Thursday.
A statement from Jean-Paul Agon, CEO at L’Oreal Group, gave no details on the cause, but her daughter, Francoise Bettencourt-Meyers, told The Guardian in a statement that her mother died at home, in France.
“She died peacefully,” the daughter said.
Bettencourt, who lived in Neuilly, a suburb west of Paris, was the only child of L’Oreal SA founder Eugene Schueller, and owned about one-third of the company’s shares.
During her lifetime, the Paris-based company grew from a small hair-dye supplier into the largest maker of beauty products with more than 30 brands including Lancome and Garnier sold in about 140 countries.
Her net worth was $42.5 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Frail and suffering from dementia in her later years, a decade ago Bettencourt became the subject of a long-running, wide-ranging swindling case that nearly engulfed France’s then-president, Nicolas Sarkozy.
After the death of her husband, the politician Andre Bettencourt, in 2007, Bettencourt-Meyers sued a high-society photographer and playboy her mother had met during a French photo shoot in 1987, and who had accepted more than a billion dollars in gifts from the elderly doyenne.
Bettencourt’s gifts to Francois-Marie Banier — who was 25 years her junior — included cash, paintings by Picasso and Matisse, and a private island in the Seychelles.
At one point, Bettencourt went still further and named Banier sole heir to her fortune.
For years, mother and daughter took public swipes at each other, fueling the bitter scandal, the Washington Post noted.
“I can’t understand what fly bit my daughter,” the mother told the French weekly Le Journal du dimanche in 2008.
“Maybe jealousy,” the mother snarked.
L’Affaire Bettencourt, as it was known in the French press, went nuclear in 2010.
That year, Bettencourt’s former butler gave police secretly-recorded tapes in which her staffers boasted of exploiting her and claimed that illegal campaign donations were being made with her money.
Weeks later, Bettencourt’s former accountant admitted handing out envelopes filled with cash to conservative politicians, including $170,000, well above the contribution limit, to Sarkozy’s former budget minister.
The charge briefly swept the president into the Bettencourt scandal spotlight. Sarkozy denied all allegations of accepting illegal cash and French magistrates eventually dropped the investigation.
But in May 2015, Banier and seven other Bettencourt employees were found guilty of swindling her. Banier was sentenced to three years prison and ordered to pay back some $600 million.
Bettencourt had defended Banier throughout, though investigators found that by 2011, she wasn’t even able to tell what year it was.
He shared with her an “irresistible friendship,” she had insisted to Paris Match after the scandal broke.
And friendships meant more than money, as she’d often noted.
“Friendship, taste for life, knowledge, health. I would say that these are the things that are the most valuable,” Bettencourt said in a rare interview with French literary magazine L’Egoiste in 1988.
“Everything that isn’t measured is what matters most.”
The mantle of the world’s wealthiest woman has now passed to Alice Walton, the youngest child of Wal-Mart Stores founder Sam Walton.
Her fortune is estimated by Bloomberg at $38.3 billion. Walton is co-manager of Walton Enterprises, one of the two family holding companies that control about half of the mega-chain.
