In these parts, the name Liliane Bettencourt is far from familiar. So when reports of her death began to make the rounds on Thursday, we got super curious; especially because the headlines carried the tagline “richest woman in the world”.

According to Forbes’ billionaire rankings, Liliane Bettencourt had an estimated net worth of $44.7 billion at the time of her passing. She was the thirteenth richest person in the world.

Liliane Henriette Charlotte Bettencourt was the heiress to the L’Oreal cosmetics company which her father, Eugene Schueller founded in 1907. Liliane was born in Paris on October 21, 1922 and as the only child, began to work in her father’s company as an apprentice at age 15.

After her father passed on 1957, Liliane inherited the fortunes of L’Oreal which is France’s fourth largest listed company and owner of the Lancome, Kiehl’s and Maybelline brands, among many others. The Financial Times writes that Liliane gave nearly half of her stakes in L’Oreal for a 3 percent stake in Swiss food giant, Nestlé. She made this decision in 1974 out of fear that the company might be nationalised if “Socialists took power in France”.

Her expansive wealth regardless, the latter years of Bettencourt’s life was riddled with a scandal rightly named the Bettencourt Affair. For a woman who had largely most of her life away from the limelight, the scandal shot Bettencourt and her family secrets straight into public scrutiny.

The year was 2007 when Liliane’s only daughter, Françoise Bettencourt Meyers whom she had had a strained relationship with, filed a lawsuit against Francois-Marie Banier, a celebrity photographer who had befriended the older Bettencourt for over two decades. Françoise accused Banier of abus de faiblesse, which essentially meant he was taking advantage of her mother’s largesse and mental state and exploiting her for years on end.

According to a Vanity Fair report, Banier, over the years, received “hundreds of millions of dollars in cash, real estate, master paintings, life insurance policies worth $400 million and an island in Seychelles from Bettencourt. In 2015, barrels of testimonies of domestic staff, one of whom claimed they overheard conversations between Banier and Bettencourt, where she planned to adopt him as her son and legal heir.

The younger Bettencourt was determined to put an end to it all as she claimed Banier, “This man had denigrated my father, manipulated my mother, and shattered our family”. She filed the lawsuit the same year her father, André Bettencourt, Liliane’s husband of 57 years died. In 2015, Banier was convicted of abuse of weakness and money laundering. He was sentenced to three years in prison and ordered to pay $173 million in damages but later appealed and had some of the court rulings relaxed.

The Banier case opened another can of worms for Bettencourt who was found to have illegally funded French president, Nicolas Sarkozy’s campaign, kept millions in secret Swiss accounts and evaded taxes, according to The New York Times. Her father, Schueller was also found to have been associated with the Nazis while her husband was said to have written anti-Semitic tracts around the time of the Second World War.

Liliane Bettencourt lived in an Art Moderne mansion where she passed on after years of suffering from dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. Her seat on the board of L’Oreal was handed to her daughter, Françoise and grandson, Jean-Victor Meyers. Unconfirmed reports have it that Françoise, who is heiress to Bettencourt’s wealth has now taken her mother’s place as the richest woman in the world.

Tolu

Your pop culture/entertainment go-to. Music head. Wallflower. I do not like to write. On a mission to decipher covfefe.