Sentences ranging from three years in prison to six months suspended sentence. This is what the thirty or so members of the "blue card gang" were tried for three weeks in Saint-Nazaire by the criminal court. A total of 33 people appeared in this exceptional trial, which was held mostly behind closed doors in the city's underwater base, due to the lack of sufficient court space.
Most of these men and women are natives of the town of Drobeta Turnu-Severin, in the southwest of Romania, and are domiciled in the Nantes region. They had been implicated following four simultaneous thefts of bank cards on July 24, 2017 in the small seaside town of Batz-sur-Mer (Loire-Atlantique).
Flights throughout France
The investigation had highlighted thefts of credit cards organized from 2014, across all of France (from the Batz-sur-Mer market, passing through the Dax festivals or even the big clearance sale in Lille) for a total damage of some 200,000 euros concerning 231 victims. Some were found guilty, others partially or totally released.
"We wanted to make this trial a little crazy, a little out of the ordinary and then in reality, we were rather on the addition of lots of small files that had been gathered because people had the same origin and that some knew each other or that some had been able to participate in teams that were made up a little randomly, "said Olivier Renard, who defended four people in this trial.
Among the 33 defendants, the cases of two of them have been separated and will be tried later this year. He is a man who had a stroke during the trial and his partner.
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- Saint Nazaire
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