Bernard Tapie, a flamboyant French business tycoon who raced cars, starred on television, served in parliament and owned one of the country’s premier soccer clubs, becoming an object of national fascination even as he faced repeated scandals and went to prison for a bribery scheme, died Oct. 3 at 78.
The cause was cancer, his family told La Provence, a Marseille newspaper that he had owned since 2012. Details on where he died were not immediately available.
Raised in the Paris suburbs, where his father worked at a refrigerator factory, Mr. Tapie became a multimillionaire before he was 40, buying ailing companies, stripping them of their assets and selling them for a profit.