2023-10-19 21:13:18
Elusive Adjani. Present in recent weeks in the pages of a number of magazines (Le Point, Paris Match, l’Obs) to explain her legal setbacks, she had chosen – as the law allows her – not to come to her trial this Thursday October 19 to sit in the dock, citing medical reasons. The National Financial Prosecutor’s Office requested without her, therefore, 18 months in prison with probationary suspension for 2 years, but also ineligibility for two years for the actress, a fine of 250,000 euros and publication of the judgment in the Official Journal.
The Paris judicial court chaired by Bénédicte de Perthuis would have liked to hear from him on the suspicions of “aggravated tax fraud” and “laundering of tax fraud” which he has been accused of by the National Financial Prosecutor’s Office (PNF) since 2016. Less sellers for the celebrity press, his lawyers Stéphane Babonneau and Olivier Pardo kept an eye on things during the hearing which lasted a few hours this Thursday. No glamor on the menu, but the dryness of the Book of Tax Procedures and, ultimately, a mixed feeling about a star who, according to the prosecutor, seems to live “on the generosity of those around him to finance his lifestyle”, with ” hooks from patrons,” he asserts in a calm tone. As of October 12, Isabelle Adjani still owed 2.5 million euros to the tax authorities, after settling part of the debt thanks to a transaction signed with Bercy.
Before the defense requested the release of the actress, the prosecution underlined how Isabelle Adjani had tried to justify a posteriori her desire to avoid tax, by resorting to complex montages in which one easily drowns during the course of the trial, blaming his advice and pretending to ignore its usefulness. And it does not matter that the litigant is called Isabelle Adjani, notes the prosecutor: “her name does not matter, it is neither an additional reason for this procedure, nor an obstacle”.
The file was opened by the PNF after the discovery of the Panama Papers, revelations by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) on a firm holding thousands of offshore companies, possible vectors of tax fraud, in exotic paradises where controls and taxation were as lenient as the mild climate. Isabelle Adjani had created a shell structure, Deckert Investments Limited, in the sunny British Virgin Islands. Just like one of his former lawyers, who is also the subject of an investigation for PNF tax fraud, still pending at this stage as a judicial source confirms to Libération.
“Protecting” Emma Watson’s anonymity
As the actress was able to develop in her recent interviews, her company Deckert has never managed any funds or been the subject of any fraud: this is not reproached to her by the financial prosecutor’s office. This shell was created in 2014 to “protect” the anonymity of an actress, Emma Watson, Adjani explained to Le Point, as part of a “huge project” which never materialized.
Investigators quickly discovered that the offshore company, which had no activity, was not a problem. But by analyzing the star’s bank accounts, the police discovered the sum of 2 million euros paid by a rich Senegalese businessman, Mamadou Diagna Diaye, his son’s godfather, president of the Senegalese National Olympic and Sports Committee. and member of the International Olympic Committee. Donation or loan? In the event of a disguised donation, in the eyes of French tax authorities it would then be a “non-family donation” and the fraud to the detriment of the tax authorities would amount, according to PNF calculations, to some 1.2 million euros. .
But no, it is a friendly “loan” of 10 years in fine, that is to say without interest and repayable until its end, the end of 2024, for Adjani’s lawyers, who assure that the transaction “was the subject of a contract duly registered with the French tax administration upon its signature in 2013”. The 2 million have not been fully reimbursed at this stage, it is in progress, the councils insist: she still owes 1.5 million euros. The actress would have been cheated by the manager of one of her boxes and relieved of 800,000 euros, she told Paris Match, hence the loan generously granted by her friend. A “Kafkaesque situation,” she commented in L’Obs.
«Loft» au Portugal
Was Isabelle Adjani also fictitiously domiciled in Portugal in recent years? Her lawyers recognize that there was a “difference of assessment” between her and the tax administration on this point in 2016 and 2017, but that their client “has no tax debt today, whether in France or Portugal and has paid everything she owes. To Match, who published photos of the apartment she says she occupies in Carcavelos, about twenty kilometers from the Portuguese capital, she assured on October 12 that she lives and has been a tax resident since 2017 in this “loft” where she has “stored his whole life”. A “small building that doesn’t look like much,” she slips into the glossy magazine. But with parking.
The tax authorities did the counting: in 2016 Adjani had spent 2 days in Portugal, and in 2017 only four days. The prosecutor notes that her situation is even “caricatural”: her home is “in France”, she has “several apartments which are rented or made available to her, such as that of the famous decorator Jacques Grange”, her bank accounts are in France, at that time she had “two children going to school here”, a “housekeeper…”
The star’s two lawyers, who had requested the postponement of the trial to a later date, due to the actress’ illness and the absence of the essential witness, the businessman who transferred the funds, found themselves faced with to the opposition of the PNF. But the president of Perthuis immediately doubted the real reasons for this request. She notes that while Adjani had been summoned to her trial since last June, she flew first class to New York on October 8 and purchased on October 16, the day she began to feel ill according to her lawyers, a return to Paris, in economy class, a flight supposed to land in Roissy only 2h30 before the start of the hearing. As if she had never planned to return to Paris to be judged.
Over the years, Adjani has become rarer on the screens, but frequents the courts more, even when her lawyers appear in her place. As Libération revealed, the actress was indicted in October 2020 for “fraud”, alongside Mimi Marchand, a celebrity press figure, who was close to the Macrons and frequents Carla Bruni and Nicolas Sarkozy, suspected of “complicity”. Falling within the framework of his relations with a former collaborator, the case, relating to possible falsifications of debt repayments – contested by both -, is still ongoing, and could give rise to classification without follow-up or referral to the criminal court.
Update: with atmospheric elements from the audience.
#months #suspended #prison #sentence #required #Isabelle #Adjani #Libération