Paris (AFP)
The mayor wants an armchair, his wife a "proportionate" punishment. On the first day of their trial on appeal for tax evasion, Patrick and Isabelle Balkany invoked Wednesday family fortunes to justify a lifestyle much higher than their income.
Very emaciated, the mayor LR of Levallois-Perret (Hauts-de-Seine), 71, appears detained, after the rejection of his last application for release. His wife and first assistant, 72, came to kiss him before sitting on the bench of the defendants.
At the bar, they claimed to recognize "faults", but never really a tax evasion, drowning the court in an avalanche of details about family rifts on the side of Isabelle Smadja - wife Balkany - or the legacy of a father deported and gifted in business on the side of Patrick Balkany.
After an hour of debate, while the defense tries - in vain - to get the trial dismissed, Isabelle Balkany rises to ask if she can give medicine to her husband who "suffers from the back". The defense claims that it is installed in an armchair.
President Sophie Clement, who is reluctant to release a prisoner from the box, will finally install a small chair. Patrick Balkany sat there grinning.
The elected is incarcerated since his conviction, September 13, to four years in prison for tax evasion. Isabelle Balkany, absent at the trial after a suicide attempt, was sentenced to three years in prison without a warrant. Both were sentenced to ten years of ineligibility. A month later, they were sentenced again for aggravated money laundering and will be retried in February.
- "My husband whom I love" -
They appealed all their convictions, remedies that suspend the execution of their sentences - except for the imprisonment of Patrick Balkany.
Until December 18, the city officials must again answer for tax evasion. They are being prosecuted for failing to pay the ISF between 2010 and 2015, despite assets estimated at 16 million euros annually, but also to have reported largely undervalued income between 2009 and 2014.
The court found that the couple should have declared the luxurious villa Pamplemousse Saint-Martin, that Isabella Balkany had belatedly admit owning, but also a sumptuous riad in Marrakech, that the couple still deny having bought.
In total, the amounts evaded are estimated at 4 million euros, an amount vigorously contested by the defense.
First and foremost, the President wants to know why the Balkany appealed.
"I recognized a fault," says Isabelle Balkany. "A fault never has an excuse but can have reasons, I wanted to express them here, and then I appeal to be totally in solidarity with my husband, whom I love and whom I admire".
She then launches into a long description of the family torment: a rich family that tears itself to the death of the father, in December 1982. She says that she agreed to sell to her brothers and sisters her shares of the father society 4 million francs, shares they sold in 1988, cashing "750 million francs": "I was robbed," she concludes.
She will then receive a "compensation" of "ten million francs" from the siblings and regrets today having had the "weakness to accept" that this money is transferred to an account in Switzerland and therefore "not declared". As for the wealth of cash available to the couple, Isabelle Balkany says it came from his mother.
"Yes or no do you recognize tax evasion?", Ends up interrupting the president. "I can not answer yes or no, because in life things are not so simple," retorts the defendant.
Patrick Balkany will not be clearer. "I think I was judged in an extraordinary, abnormal way," he begins. The only thing he really blames himself for is having "lost" the tax clearance attesting to the repatriation of cash that his father had placed in Switzerland - the court found that there was no evidence that he had repatriated assets nor did he have any proof of having sold in France "gold bars" bequeathed by his father.
The trial continues Monday.
© 2019 AFP