More than three and a half years after their first appearance before the Paris Criminal Court responsible for examining their tax offences, Patrick and Isabelle Balkany, 74 and 75, experienced a new important stage on Monday, January 9, but not yet everything. quite the epilogue, of a judicial journey so long that it may be useful to recall the previous episodes.
Tried in May and June 2019 for “tax fraud” and “laundering of tax fraud”, the former mayor (Les Républicains) of Levallois-Perret (Hauts-de-Seine) had been sentenced to four years in prison in the first case. , and at five years in the second. For these same facts, his wife – and former assistant – had been sentenced to three and four years. The couple appealed.
At the end of the second trial for “tax evasion”, in 2020, both had been sentenced to three years in prison, a final judgment, for lack of appeal in cassation. In the “laundering” section, their sentences of five and four years had been confirmed on appeal, as had the confiscation of their real estate, including their main residence in Giverny (Eure).
The two spouses had then appealed to the Court of Cassation, which had confirmed their guilt, but considered that the confiscation of the residence of Giverny was illegal, Patrick and Isabelle Balkany having only the usufruct, since they ceded the bare ownership to their children in 1997. The highest French court had therefore ordered a new trial, which was held on October 25, 2022, relating only to the sentences pronounced in the “money laundering” section.
Defense obtains confusion of sentences
These were reduced by the Paris Court of Appeal on Monday: from five years and four years in prison, they went to four and a half years for him, three and a half years for her. The defense also obtained the confusion of these sentences with those of three years for “tax evasion”: they no longer add up – the seconds merge into the first -, which has the consequence, according to the lawyers of the Balkany spouses , that their clients will not return to prison.
If Isabelle Balkany has always escaped there for medical reasons, her husband had been imprisoned from September 2019 to February 2020, before being released under an electronic bracelet for health reasons, then returning to detention from February to August 2022, as a result of a very random compliance with his house arrest.
The Paris Court of Appeal also confirmed, on Monday, the ten years of ineligibility and the 100,000 euros fine initially pronounced against each of the two spouses, but it reduced the amount of damages that they will have to pay. pay to the State: from 1 million euros, this increases to 400,000 euros.
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