Aging L'Oreal heiress gave gifts worth $1.45b to shutterbug

France's richest woman, L'Oreal heiress Liliane Bettencourt, has been forced to insist she is of sound mind after she gave more than a billion dollars in gifts to a society photographer.

The top shareholder in the global cosmetics empire with a personal fortune estimated by Forbes magazine at $23 billion, the 86-year-old Bettencourt is one of the world's richest women and a well-known patron of the arts.

She has also, it emerged this month, donated a sizeable chunk of her vast fortune to Francois-Marie Banier, a Parisian artist and photographer to the stars and a long-time family friend of the Bettencourts.