Michel Ohayon is now the subject of a preliminary investigation by the Paris prosecutor’s office, we learned on Monday February 27. The national court in charge of the fight against organized crime (Junalco), which sits in the capital, has taken up the various legal files of the Bordeaux entrepreneur.
The investigators of the section specializing in financial crime within Junalco have the task of widening the investigations to all the companies held by the Financière immobilière bordelaise (FIB), Mr. Ohayon’s holding company, and its subsidiary Hermione. People & Brands (HPB), parent company of Go Sport and Gap, twenty-six Galeries Lafayette stores operated under franchise, and the late Camaïeu.
In Grenoble, the gendarmerie’s research section had been charged by the prosecution, in November 2022, with a preliminary investigation for “abuse of social good”, following revelations of criminal acts within the Go Sport group by its auditors, KPMG and Ernst & Young. The latter had alerted the Grenoble Commercial Court following “disbursements relating to non-recurring items for an amount of 36.3 million euros” which have strained the cash flow of the sporting goods brand.
“1.5 billion euros” of real estate assets
The FIB bought the Go Sport group at the end of 2021 from the Rallye group; the brand had obtained two loans guaranteed by the State, in 2020 and 2021, for a cumulative amount of 55 million euros. A conciliation protocol registered with the Commercial Court of Grenoble prohibited the transfer of these funds to other companies.
The Grenoble public prosecutor’s office was also investigating the takeover of the Gap brand, another subsidiary of the FIB, by the Go Sport group for an amount of 38 million euros, at the end of December 2022. According to our information, the offenses that it was intended to fall within the scope of fraud in an organized gang, habitual money laundering, bankruptcy and abuse of corporate assets, an offense punishable for a manager by a prison term of five years and a fine of 375,000 euros.
The Grenoble public prosecutor’s office, which was concerned about a cavalry system, where one company bails out another despite the absence of intra-company agreements, had approached the prosecutors of Lille, the jurisdiction to which Camaïeu belonged, subsidiary of the FIB liquidated in September 2022, and Bordeaux, headquarters of several of Mr. Ohayon’s companies. However, this rapprochement does not succeed. He withdrew from the investigation on February 17. Junalco now takes over.
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