Paris (AFP)
The mayor of Levallois-Perret Patrick Balkany and his wife Isabelle will be retried February 3 to 19, 2020 for aggravated money laundering, after their trial on appeal for tax evasion in December.
The former baron of Hauts-de-Seine, 71, has been incarcerated since his first conviction for tax evasion on 13 September. In this first phase, he was sentenced to four years in prison, with immediate imprisonment, his wife and first assistant to three years in prison, and both to ten years of ineligibility.
In the second part of this case, Patrick Balkany was sentenced on October 18 to five years in prison for aggravated money laundering with a new warrant of committal, but was released from the corruption offense.
His wife Isabelle was sentenced to four years in prison, but without immediate imprisonment because of her fragile health.
Both were again sentenced to ten years of ineligibility, as well as ten years of prohibition to run a company. And the court ordered the seizure of property and assets of the couple, including their mill in Giverny (Eure).
They appealed all of their convictions and filed applications for release. A first was granted him, accompanied by heavy obligations including the payment of a deposit of 500,000 euros, which he struggles to meet.
But the second, in the money laundering aspect, was refused in particular "to prevent the exercise of a dialogue between the people implicated" in this case before the opening of the appeal.
After this refusal, the elected has filed a new application for release to the Paris Court of Appeal, whose date of examination has not yet been fixed.
In this part whitening, where they were judged in the first instance alongside a billionaire (relaxed for corruption), a lawyer, a close of the mayor and their son Alexander, the Balkany will be alone on the bench of the defendants .
On the merits, Patrick Balkany has recognized errors while minimizing them - evoking an undeclared family legacy in Switzerland in the tax fraud aspect of his trial. But he challenged most of the money laundering charges, denying owning a luxury riad in Marrakech and assuring that he was a foreigner to the offshore assembly that led to his acquisition.
© 2019 AFP