Nanterre (AFP)

The mayor Les Républicains de Puteaux (Hauts-de-Seine), Joëlle Ceccaldi-Raynaud, was indicted on Wednesday for laundering of aggravated tax fraud, suspected of having transmitted undeclared funds to his daughter, he said. we learned from a judicial source.

In police custody since Monday afternoon, the elected official was placed under judicial control, the Nanterre public prosecutor's office told AFP, confirming information from the Parisian.

The suspicions of fraud arose from an article in Mediapart published in September 2015, which reported a withdrawal by the mayor of Puteaux of 102 gold bars (valued at the time at 2 million euros) and nearly 865,000 euros in cash on an undeclared account in Luxembourg, transferred after conversion into cash in 2004 to his daughter Émilie Franchi.

A first preliminary investigation, entrusted to the Central Office for the Fight against Fiscal and Financial Offenses (OCLIFF), had been opened against X for laundering of tax fraud in May 2016. It had been extended in January 2017 to specifically target the daughter of the mayor of Puteaux for tax evasion.

Asked after the revelations of Mediapart, Joëlle Ceccaldi-Raynaud had always denied having owned these ingots.

According to another article published two years later by the information site, the mayor of Puteaux then turned around by acknowledging, in November 2015 before an examining magistrate, the existence of the Luxembourg account and to have some transferred the funds to his children.

This judge had summoned her in the context of another case, that of the allegedly rigged market for the heating of La Défense, in which the father of the elected and former senator-mayor of Puteaux, Charles Ceccaldi-Raynaud, had been put under review in 2007 for passive corruption and favoritism.

During this hearing, Charles Ceccaldi-Raynaud, who died in 2019 at the age of 94, suggested that these disputed funds came from bribes paid by the winner of the market and accused his daughter of having benefited from it.

Joëlle Ceccaldi-Raynaud, who had broken up with her father, then defended herself by saying that it was an inheritance from a Corsican grandmother.

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