PARIS — A French court will examine whether the elderly heiress to the L’Oréal fortune, Europe’s richest woman, was in her right mind when she lavished gifts worth close to $1.4 billion on a younger male friend.
Prosecutor Philippe Courroye, who has been probing for more than a year the gifts made by Liliane Bettencourt, 86, to photographer Francois-Marie Banier, said yesterday the case would come to trial in September..