Hervé Temime, tenor of the Paris bar and lawyer for Bernard Tapie, Gérard Depardieu, and the UBS bank, died on Monday at the age of 65, according to his family.
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| French lawyer Herve Temime |
"It is with great sadness that the family of Me Hervé Temime announces his death on Monday," she stated in a statement to AFP.
"The bar is orphaned. Hervé Temime has recently departed us. He was a fantastic lawyer," said Keeper of the Seals and former lawyer Éric Dupond-Moretti.
"He marked a generation with his intelligence, humanity, and talent," the Minister of Justice concluded. "I have fond memories of his family and loved ones."
The lawyer, who was born in Algiers (Algeria) in 1957 and moved to France when he was four years old, began his profession in 1979.
With the emergence of political and financial cases in the 1980s and 1990s, Me Temime concentrated on general criminal law and business criminal law, as part of this group of attorneys specialized in the defense of white collar employees.
Among his prominent clients are the UBS bank, the Servier laboratory, the actor Gérard Depardieu, the director Roman Polanski, and the family of Agnès Le Roux during the Maurice Agnelet trial. Last year, he joined the defense of disgraced car mogul Carlos Ghosn in France, and earlier this year, he argued for Me Xavier Nogueras in a case of forgery for the benefit of drug trafficker Robert Dawes.
His vocation, like many of his colleagues, was born to "save heads" at a time when those of the condemned were still being severed, he explained to AFP in November 2020, a few days before the first instance trial of the telephone tapping in which appeared his client and friend Me Thierry Herzog, as well as former President Nicolas Sarkozy.
For more than four decades, he vehemently maintained confidentiality as "not a privilege for a lawyer, but an obligation."
According to the website of his office on Rue de Rivoli, the lawyer with thick spectacles created the association of criminal attorneys in 1991 and stood on the council of the order of the Paris bar between 1999 and 2002.
Sources: France24, LePoint