French billionaire and politician Serge Dassault has been fined two million euros and banned from public office for five years for money-laundering and tax evasion, reports RFI.
The senator and boss of Dassault Aviation and Le Figaro newspaper was found to have hidden over 40 million euros in foreign bank accounts but was not sent to jail because of his age.
Dassault can appeal against the sentence and so is unlikely to have to give up his seat in the French Senate, where he represents the mainstream right Republicans party whose presidential candidate, François Fillon, faces his own troubles, before the next election in 2017.
At 91, he is the oldest member of the Senate and his age saved him from going to jail, even though the size of the fraud and the length of time it continued would have merited imprisonment in the judges' view.
Dassault, who was ranked France's fifth-richest man in 2016 by Challenges magazine, was found to have hidden millions of euros from the tax authorities over 15 years in accounts in Liechtenstein and Luxembourg, including 31 million euros in 2006 and nearly 12 million in 2014.
He also omitted to declare 16 million euros of property on his 2011 tax declaration and 11 million euros in 2014.
Since the fraud was discovered, the millionaire aeronautics boss has paid 19 million euros in back taxes, a fact that his lawyers argued should weigh in his favour.They also claimed that he had inherited the tax-dodging system from his father, Marcel, who hid his money because "he was frightened of going through another war" and wanted to "protect his family".