“The bar is an orphan”, moved in a tweet Éric Dupond-Moretti this Monday, April 10, 2023. The Minister of Justice has therefore formalized the death of his former colleague following a dissection of the aorta .
Media figure of the bar, Hervé Temime distinguished himself during his career in trials that had a great impact. He notably intervened in the Clearstream, Polanski and Agnelet cases. During his career, he has defended famous clients such as Bernard Tapie, Roman Polanski, François-Marie Banier in the Bettencourt case, Gérard Depardieu, Alain Afflelou, Jacques Servier, Laura Smet, and even Jean-Noël Guérini.
White Collar Defense
The lawyer, born in 1957 in Algiers (Algeria) and arrived in France at the age of four, began his career in 1979.
Me Temime focused on general criminal law and business criminal law, being part of this generation of lawyers specializing in the defense of white collar workers, with the rise of political and financial cases in the 1980s and 1990s.
The UBS bank, the Servier laboratories, the actor Gérard Depardieu, the director Roman Polanski, the family of Agnès Le Roux at the trial of Maurice Agnelet are among his main clients. He had joined the defense in France last year of the deposed auto magnate Carlos Ghosn and had pleaded at the beginning of the year for Me Xavier Nogueras in a case of forgery for the benefit of the drug trafficker Robert Dawes.
The defense of secrecy
Like many of his colleagues, his vocation was born to “save heads”, at a time when those of the condemned were still being cut off, he explained in November 2020 to AFP, a few days before the first instance trial of the telephone tapping in which appeared the lawyer Me Thierry Herzog, his client and friend, and the former head of state Nicolas Sarkozy.
For more than forty years, he fiercely defended secrecy, “which is not a privilege for a lawyer but an obligation”.
The lawyer with thick glasses had founded the association of criminal lawyers in 1991 and sat on the council of the order of the Paris bar between 1999 and 2002, according to the website of his firm located rue de Rivoli, close to the Louvre.