Jewish Gay Man Gets 1 Billion From L'Oreal Heiress, Daughter

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To Francois-Marie Banier’s critics, his only aim was to take the L’Oréal heiress Liliane Bettencourt for as much money as possible.

Greed was doubtless part of the mix, but theirs was a profound and complex relationship. Whatever material interests motivated him, Banier had a deep and genuine affection for the heiress. She apparently felt something stronger for him. As Liliane described the relationship in a 2008 letter to Banier: “With you, I am like a mother, a lover, all the feelings pass through me. It makes me tremble.”

In June 2007, Liliane cashed in a life-insurance contract worth €82.9 million (on which she paid €49.7 million in taxes) and gave the proceeds to Banier. He immediately put the funds into three new contracts, one in his name and the other two in the names of Martin d’Orgeval and Pascal Greggory. Using his own policy as a sort of cash machine, he drew large sums from it to buy artworks, a house in Marrakesh, and improvements on his villa in the south of France.

The L’Oréal contracts, first signed in 1994, were eventually worth €710,000 a year to Banier. The business benefit to the company was questionable, but Lindsay Owen-Jones, L’Oréal’s CEO at the time, went along with the sweetheart deal essentially to please Madame Bettencourt, on whom his job depended.

There was another thing that made Banier immensely attractive to Liliane: he reminded her of her adored father, Eugène Schueller.

At first glance, it would be hard to find two men more different from each other than François-Marie Banier and Eugène Schueller. Banier is tall and trim; Schueller was short and squat. Banier, at least in his youth, was an Adonis; Schueller, even young, looked more like Charlie Chaplin than a Greek god. Banier is an artist, writer, and romantic; Schueller was a scientist, inventor, and businessman. Banier is a homosexual half-Jew; Schueller was heterosexual, a staunch Catholic, and arguably an anti-Semite.