“More than 400 million to repay, it’s a sum!” : Stéphane, Bernard Tapie’s eldest son, talks about his father’s debts

The eldest son of Bernard Tapie, Stéphane, will publish this January 12 “How to say goodbye to you”, a book in which he paints the portrait of his father and evokes in particular the debts that the former boss of OM left behind him .

He wanted to tell his story and restore truths. A year after the death of Bernard Tapie, his eldest Stéphane has decided to tell his story in a book entitled “How to say goodbye to you”, which will be released on January 12 in bookstores, and from which Gala and Here are reporting extracts this Thursday. In this book, he mentions in particular the debts of his father. “More than 400 million to repay, it’s a sum!”, Confides Stephane Tapie, who wants to stop rumors that large sums of money have been hidden somewhere. “Many moreover remain convinced that he has stashed money in a tax haven (…) I will disappoint them, he has not stashed anything at all. For the simple and good reason: Tapie was convinced that he was going to recover. Tapie was not in the transmission, he was not an empire builder like Marcel Dassault or Marcel Boussac were,” says Stéphane Tapie.

As to whether he regrets not having received an inheritance, he assures that he does not care completely: “It is paradoxical to be an heir and to inherit nothing. (…) I have never been attached to material goods, I am not interested and that is better!”, he declares.

Death was a release

Gala, who publishes this Thursday the good sheets of his book, reports that Stéphane, who “willingly admits never having been the politician’s favorite son” and preferred to call his father ‘Tapie’ than ‘dad’, struggled to come to terms with his passing. Nonetheless, he says dying will have been “a relief” for his father.

“We all saw that he was waking up less and less, that he was slipping. My father was in a coma. He died on October 3, 2021, in the morning, surrounded by all his family. That’s what he wanted, he didn’t want to die on a hospital bed and I think he had the most beautiful death. I saw that life had gone to his breath which stopped, to his face which calmed down. For my father, death was a relief, a release. He was a prisoner of his body, of pain,” he wrote.

On October 3, 2021, Bernard Tapie died of stomach cancer. The famous French businessman thus left behind his four children, Stéphane and Nathalie, born of his union with Michèle Layec, and Sophie and Laurent, born of his second marriage with Dominique Mialet-Damianos.