Bernard Tapie, a French tycoon, politician, actor and rogue

His swashbuckling career spanned business, sports, politics and the arts, but also scandal and prison. Tapie, who revealed in 2017 that he had cancer of the stomach and oesophagus, made a vast fortune, lost it and then made it back again, only to end his life broke following a scandal which embroiled Christine Lagarde, now head of the European Central Bank. "If there is one thing I know how to do, it is making dough," the permanently tanned tycoon once boasted.

But in 2015 he was forced to admit: "I am ruined. I haven't got a thing." Like many of his flamboyant declarations, it was to be taken with a pinch of salt, although he was indeed down to his last few mansions.