Obituary: Pierre de Varga

Pierre de Varga, businessman: born Tomessy, Hungary 1920; died Paris 30 June 1995.

The name of Pierre de Varga became famous in France after Christmas Eve 1976. But Pierre de Varga was only one of the names by which this man was known. He had sometimes been Peter Varga, sometimes Hirsch, sometimes Tomessy or Varga de Tommessy, names which he claimed were derived from his family in Hungary. He had come to France, from Budapest, as a young man in 1938.

Under all these names he became well known to the police. By 1976 he had spent several years in prison for a variety of offences, including blackmail, forgery and the passing of dud cheques. Nevertheless he had powerful friends in the police. Passing himself off as a Hungarian refugee who was violently anti-Communist, he infiltrated extreme-right organisations and passed on information about their activities. This expertise in clandestinity was the key to his financial operations in which companies were founded only to disappear and then be re-created under different names, in which credits moved from one bank to another, and in which there was always a role to be played by some man of straw.

It appears that such a man was Jean de Broglie, who had been a minister under de Gaulle and a close associate of Giscard d'Estaing, who was both a French and European deputy and who was the head of one of France's most distinguished families. For reasons which remain obscure, de Broglie had moved into some of the more shady areas of financial speculation. He used his name as a guarantor of loans and as a means of launching a whole series of ventures. He became associated with Pierre de Varga when he wanted to acquire a restaurant near to the Gare Saint Lazare. Varga was an expert in taking over famous restaurants. Invariably the restaurant fell into deep financial trouble but Varga, and its associates, pocketed appreciable sums of money.

Someone decided that in order to cancel the debts for which de Broglie was the guarantor, he should be got rid of. A sturdy playboy of a policeman called Simone hired a professional killer, who shot de Broglie as he was leaving Varga's apartment on 24 December 1976. Within a matter of hours the killer and Simone were arrested and the latter claimed that Varga had asked him to arrange for the murder.

Varga denied having had any role in the affair. He claimed that he would hardly have been allowed de Broglie to be shot on his own doorstep. Nevertheless he was held to be the chief instigator of the whole affair and in 1981 he was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

It all became something of a cause celebre. Giscard d'Estaing did not want enquiries to be too extensive. The role of the police was bizarre, since they appear to have known about the plot to kill de Broglie some time before the killing took place. There were endless rumours.

Varga always protested his innocence. He claimed that he spent his time in prison weeping with rage and indignation. But he never made any revelations, not even when he emerged from prison after he had served seven years of his sentence. Perhaps, like de Broglie, he too was a victim. Largely forgotten, he died at the age of 75.