Ten people face charges of exploiting Liliane Bettencourt's frailty in her advancing years, at a court room in Bordeaux. One key figure in the case, Patrice de Maistre, Bettencourt's former estate manager, was present at the trial's opening on Monday morning. Parisian judge Roger Le Loire was expected to spend most of the opening two days dealing with procedural questions in a multi-million-euro dispute that helped sour former Preisdent Nicolas Sarkozy's tenure.

The case involved the L'Oréal cosmetics fortune, an heiress of diminishing faculties, and an entourage keen on their pieces of a plentiful pie.

Liliane Bettencourt's former confidant Francois-Marie Banier is among those charged with exploiting the frail holder of the world's 12th-largest fortune.

Banier, an artist and photographer, was showered with gifts by Bettencourt after they became close, such as paintings by Picasso and Matisse and millions of euros in cash. Bettencourt even made him her sole heir, to a family fortune currently estimated at $38.8 billion (34.7 billion euros) by Forbes magazine, only to revoke this later. Banier could face a maximum of three years in prison and a fine of up to 375,000 euros.

Bettencourt's daughter Francoise Bettencourt Meyers first filed charges against Banier in 2007 for exploiting her mother's mental fragility. But the billionaire resisted her daughter, disputing that she was losing her faculties.

The benevolent butler

Bettencourt's butler, Pascal Bonnefoy, ultimately took matters into his own hands, placing a recording device in his employer's office. The audio footage revealed Bettencourt's weakened state, and how her entourage was manipulating and exploiting her.

Media accounts of the recordings attest that Patrice de Maistre, a 65-year-old once in charge of managing Bettencourt's fortune, can be heard encouraging her to commit tax evasion, for instance by hiding the purchase of a Seychelles island.

De Maistre will also face charges in Bordeaux of getting Bettencourt to hand over cash envelopes to members of France's then-ruling, conservative UMP party. One of these is De Maistre's friend, Eric Woerth, a former minister and campaign treasurer for ex-president Sarkozy.

Woerth was among the last defendants to reach court on Monday, according to Metro France reporter Julie Mendel on Twitter, who posted a picture of the former minister, "all smiles," greeting de Maistre on his arrivals.

No ex-president on stand, after all

Charges were even leveled against Sarkozy personally in the case in 2012, after his election defeat to Francois Hollande, but these were dropped in 2013 owing to a lack of evidence, easing Sarkozy's return to the hunt for the French presidency.

Banier's partner Martin d'Orgeval, Bettencourt's Seychelles administrator, three of the L'Oréal heiress' notaries and her nurse also face charges in the case. According to the AFP news agency and court reporter Mendel, citing proseuctors, the nurse tried to commit suicide ahead of the trial's start.

"We do not know [if Alain Thurin] is alive or dead," the tribunal's president, Denis Roucou, said at the opening of proceedings.

Pascal Wilhelm, who was Bettencourt's estate manager after de Maistre, French businessman Stephane Courbit, and Bettencourt's fiscal lawyer Fabrice Goguel complete the line-up in court. Courbit appeared to have reached a last-minute out of court settlement with the Bettencourts, on Friday returning to the family an investment of 143.7 million euros once paid into his Lov Group company.

Bettencourt was declared unfit to run her own affairs in 2011, diagnosed as suffering from "mixed dementia" and "moderately severe" Alzheimer's disease. Her fortune and the cosmetics company have been placed under the stewardship of her family members.

The Bordeaux trial is currently scheduled to last five weeks.

msh/rg (AFP, Reuters)