Writing about criminal groups comes with risks. This is shown every year by the press freedom barometer maintained by Reporters Without Borders (RSF): journalists are victims of organised crime just about everywhere in the world, on top of the constant threats against the press.
One of the brains behind a massive fraud in carbon permit trading, Arnaud Mimran, 51, who is angry about the articles published by Mediapart on the fraud affair, has described ways he wants to get revenge in a vendetta against our journalist Fabrice Arfi, who jointly runs our investigation unit. Behind bars since 2015, Mimran has also dreamt up traps he wants to set for others against whom he bears a grudge, including an “ambush” aimed at intimidating former investigating judge Guillaume Daieff, who led the probe into what became known as the “fraud of the century”.
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These threats have been revealed by judge-approved eavesdropping of the prisoner carried out between 2019 and 2020, the contents of which Mediapart has seen. The ongoing judicial investigation shows that Arnaud Mimran even got hold of the former judge's address. When questioned in February about the eavesdropped comments – recorded via listening devices in his cell and the visiting rooms he uses at at the jail in Le Havre, northern France, where he is imprisoned – Arnaud Mimran said he was “joking”.
Arnaud Mimran is not someone who makes detectives and judges laugh. He was jailed for eight years over the carbon trading fraud. He was also handed a thirteen year sentence for kidnapping, unlawful detention and extortion in relation to a Turkish-Swiss financier – a case in which he had even faked his own kidnapping. And he is currently under investigation for “murder as part of an organised group” in three murder cases, including that of his former father-in-law and billionaire Claude Dray. He denies the murder claims.
In the bugged conversations Mimran spoke to his partner and friends about numerous violent plans. “I'll be back, you'll see,” he said to his girlfriend, just like the main character in his “favourite story” the French novel 'The Count of Monte Cristo'. “Just like him I will get my revenge,” said Mimran. “Revenge against who?” asked his girlfriend. “I don't know, we'll see, I'll have a think. You'll see... with money you can get revenge on everyone.”
In February one of the investigating judges in the murder cases questioned the convicted fraudster about this thirst for vengeance. “It's only since I've been in jail that people have been lying about me, wiping their feet all over me, so I feel a sense of injustice and sometimes even hate,” he said.
'Something bad really has to happen to him'
The author of a 2018 book on the carbon trading fraud - 'D'argent et de sang' ('Money and blood') published by Le Seuil – and of many articles on the affair for Mediapart, Fabrice Arfi is one of the jailed crime boss's favourite targets. “Something bad really has to happen to him,” Mimran said in June 2019. He gave more detail a few days later. “All these journalists, I hate them more than the magistrates, if you were to say to me 'Some of them are dead', that wouldn't worry me … Fabrice Arfi, for example, is the worst scoundrel on Earth … but he's picked the wrong person with me,” said Mimran in the eavesdropped conversation.
He went on: “You see the difference between people. Sarko [editor's note, former president Nicolas Sarkozy] loathes him, he writes nothing. I hate him but I'm going to do something to him. Ah, for sure, I'll do something to him. He's going to find himself in an hotel room with a girl who will make an accusation of rape, and there'll be cocaine on the table … there's something rotten, I'm going to ruin his relationship, he'll find himself in custody, all of it! … And the moment that this happens, before the police have even arrived in the room, I'll already be broadcasting the news.”
He says that he “swears” he will do this. That he “will do something like that”. He added: “Getting hit is nothing. I want him to suffer, for people to judge him.”
Arnaud Mimran repeated this scenario practically word for word in October 2019. “I swear that when I get out I'll do something to him,” he said. “I'll take a girl, I swear, she'll follow him, she'll charm him, he'll go to the hotel with her, she'll start to cry out, she'll make a rape allegation, and there'll be an article in the newspapers [explaining that] he's a rapist. It will still be serious even if he's not convicted afterwards, at least he'll see what it's like to be besmirched. I swear I'll do that. I swear! … I'll take my time to deal with him.”
Detectives from the Paris crime squad involved in the investigation also reveal in a report that the prisoner had carried out some online searches about the journalist.
In November 2021 Arnaud Mimran was questioned by these detectives about the threats against Fabrice Arfi. “Do you often want harm to come to others? Do you often devise Machiavellian plans like this to avenge yourself?” the officers asked him. On two occasions Mimran replied in the same way: “I'm saying nothing.”
Then, in February this year, when asked by judges about the same issue, he replied: “It's all false … I wanted to make J. [editor's note, his partner] laugh. According to the transcript of the bugged conversations Mimran's girlfriend was not amused by his plans. “You're mad … you're off your rocker,” she told him.
Judge's home address
Arnaud Minrain said he was also joking when he had spoken about some of the judges who had investigated him, such as Benoist Hurel (over the murder allegations) and Guillaume Daieff (who handled the fraud probe), saying that he would take them to the grave with him. “I regularly took on Mr Hurel face to face, mocking him, telling him for example that my biggest wish was no longer getting out of prison but him joining me there. I joke. I make fun. Mr Hurel knows that,” he explained.
Speaking on the phone with a friend, Mimran crowed: “Blood will flow! He will pay! He will cry!” His friend reply replied: “Hurel?” Mimran responded: “Yeah! You know what I'm going to do? I'm going to kidnap him, I'm going to make him my prisoner.” The friend said: “Not bad!” Mimran continued: “I'm going to keep him at the bottom of a cellar for four years and every year I'm going to say to him: 'Convince me to let you go, you're going before the parole board'.”
He imagined “beating” both judges. “Tomorrow I'm told I've got cancer and have six months to live. In the final month Hurel and Daieff are with me in a cellar,” he said in a conversation recorded in November 2020.
During one eavesdropped conversation in December 2019 Arnaud Mimran also obtained Guillaume Daieff's home address. He had the idea of going to see him, imagining the scene from one of the murders he is accused of ordering, that of Albert Taïeb, killed in 2014 in the entrance hall of a block of flats by two men wearing motorcycle helmets. “I can swear to you that when he sees me in the building, he's going to think that it's for him, on my mother's life he will be shaking … I'm going to turn up with a motorcycle helmet, I'm going to play the part … with a bag. He's going [to go] 'Aaaaaah!'. [And I'll reply] 'What do you want, you great son of a bitch? What do you want, you great son of a bitch?'”.
“It's all false,” said Mimran when he was later questioned about this. “The only thing that's true is that one day I talked with a girl who told me that a judge lived in her apartment block. I imagined that it was Guillaume Daieff and I invented this story like that, for fun.” The carbon trading fraudster insisted that he “no longer recalled who this woman was”. He said: “It was a girl I was speaking to on Facebook, I don't even know her.”
The scenario was, however, taken seriously by the investigating judges themselves who on February 16th this year wrote a report noting that the address given by Arnaud Mimran was indeed that of the judge concerned, Guillaume Daieff. For the time being the judicial authorities have stopped there, noting the threats made by the crime boss from his prison cell, but not raising them to the level of a criminal plot.
Contacted by Mediapart, judges Benoist Hurel and Guillaume Daieff declined to comment.
Meanwhile Mediapart has asked its lawyer Emmanuel Tordjman, from the law firm Seattle, to refer the matter to the public prosecutor in Paris as a matter of urgency. Publishing editor Edwy Plenel has written in his blog about the seriousness of the threats against a Mediapart journalist. “Coming from a known criminal, a key figure in a vast and bloody fraud, these threats targeting Fabrice Arfi cannot be just taken as everyday boasting,” he said. “It's the first time in its history that Mediapart has been explicitly targeted in this way by an organised criminal underworld that its investigations have uncovered, an underworld which in this case has some links to political and government interests, as we have once again recently revealed,” he noted.
“Our concerns are all the greater given that it was through our own investigations that we fortuitously learnt of the risks faced by Fabrice Arfi, having not been warned in advance by judicial or police representatives.” He added: “That's why, as a matter or urgency, we have referred it to the prosecution service so that it can enlighten us over this passiveness and put a stop to it.”
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- The original French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter