For the past four years two police units have been probing what could turn out to be one of the biggest cases yet seen in France involving the concealment or non-declaration of artworks in order to avoid inheritance tax.
The case involves the estate of Claude Berri, born Langmann, the son of Jewish immigrants who went on to become one of the great figures of French cinema. His films included classics such as Tchao Pantin, Jean de Florette, Manon des Sources and Germinal as a director, and L’Ours, L’Amant, Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis and Astérix et Obélix: Mission Cléopâtre as a producer.
On paper the prestigious casting that this affair assembles – personalities from the world of cinema, the daughter of a member of the French Academy who became a successful writer, the former boss of a major auction house, the most influential public notary in France today – already says a great deal about its extraordinary nature. Indeed, the story has already attracted the interest of parts of the media, such as France 2 television's 'Complément d’enquête' investigation programme and 'Vanity Fair' magazine.
However, besides the basic facts and the personalities involved in this legal drama, the case also highlights the gaping holes in how the French tax system deals with works of art in the estates of wealthy deceased individuals, and any potential abuses that may exist, especially tax-related. In short, art is a tax haven and the public authorities are structurally incapable of gauging the extent of the problem, lacking both the legislative tools and the investigatory resources to do so.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
In this respect, the Berri affair is a textbook example. The numbers involved are staggering. According to a legal document dating from January 2022, around 430 works of art were not finally included in the film-maker's estate after his death in 2009. Informed sources close to the case now put that figure at closer to 500.
Given the high quality of the collection, the sums that could ultimately have escaped potential inheritance tax may run into tens of millions of euros, perhaps more. If the investigation were to establish that this was indeed the case, it would represent a considerable loss of revenue for the French Treasury.
But perhaps the worst aspect is that in reality the nation's tax inspectors had no chance of discovering any potential impropriety through their own resources. It took a fratricidal war years later within the Berri family to bring this hidden world to the surface.
How could such a situation have been possible?
The origins of the investigation
The saga began with an ending. Claude Berri, who had been severely incapacitated by a stroke in 2005, died in Paris on January 9th 2009. This leading figure in French cinema left behind him a list of films known throughout France but also many works of art in his personal collection: from contemporary, modern and tribal art to photographs and furniture. It is one of the most beautiful and scholarly private collections in the country, containing works by Picasso, Picabia, Giacometti, Dubuffet, Dalí, Man Ray, Penone, Ryman, Fontana and many others.
In 2015 one of Claude Berri's sons, Thomas Langmann, himself a leading figure in French cinema – he was the producer of The Artist which won an Oscar for best picture – suspected his half-brother Darius of having arranged, with others, the concealment of a huge number of artworks in their father's collection from his estate. A formal legal complaint was filed in 2018 and since then the legal authorities have been investigating.
Two police units were tasked with investigating the case: the cultural goods trafficking unit the Office Central de lutte contre le trafic des Biens Culturels (OCBC) and the fraud squad the Brigade de Répression de la Délinquance Astucieuse (BRDA). After years of investigation worthy of the 'Cluedo' board game – who is suspected of having hidden what, how and where? - in some of the most upmarket neighbourhoods in Paris, several people have now attracted the detectives' curiosity.
Among them are Darius Langmann, Claude Berri's youngest son who was born in 1986, and the writer and producer Nathalie Rheims, the film-maker's last partner.
According to police and judicial reports, the suspicion is that many works of art that were in Claude Berri's collection when he was alive were removed from it after his death. Those documents talk of “several concealments”, of the “removal of goods”, of “misappropriation” and of “deliberate exclusion”. As discoveries were made the investigation stacked up the number of alleged offences it was looking into: “breach of trust”, “organised theft”, “money laundering” and “forgery and the use of false instruments”.
A wave of searches carried out in the spring of 2021, in particular at the homes of Darius Langmann and Nathalie Rheims, led to the discovery of more than 150 works of art, some of which according to Mediapart's information were described by detectives as “misappropriated and stolen goods”.
Among the dozens of works that interested the investigators were: the painting New York by Francis Picabia; some seascape photographs by Sugimoto; Le Cavalier de la Mort by Salvador Dalí; Geist des Gewölbes by Paul Klee; Self Portrait with Christmas by Man Ray; a portrait of Andy Warhol by Robert Mapplethorpe; the sculpture Deposizione, by Lucio Fontana; the photo Giacometti dans son atelier by Robert Doisneau, and Trois Têtes by Henri Michaux.
A judgement by the investigations chamber of the Paris court of appeal dated January 18th 2022, and already cited by the daily newspaper Le Parisien and the investigative weekly Le Canard enchaîné, also speaks of “certain works that could be described as stolen or misappropriated”. In relation to Nathalie Rheims, for example, investigators highlighted the possible misappropriation of a work by Japanese artist Hiroshi Sugimoto which was later sold for 1.5 million euros thanks to an owner's invoice whose “authenticity had been called into question” by the investigation, according to the court of appeal.
When approached by Mediapart neither Nathalie Rheims nor her lawyer, Christophe Ingrain, chose to comment.
Enlargement : Illustration 2
Meanwhile Darius Langmann's lawyer, Laurent Merlet, said that his client had not been questioned since the the investigation opened in 2018 and that as a result he had no access to the judicial files. “However, he categorically denies any misappropriation of works from his father's estate: following a certified division [of property] between the two brothers in 2011, some works that were not inventoried remained to be divided up and two experts chosen by the inheritors valued these works between 2013 and 2015,” said the lawyer. Laurent Merlet also said that neither the court of appeal nor the tax authorities had “substantiated this tall story of misappropriated works” (see the lawyer's full response, in French, here).
At this stage of the probe no one has been placed under formal investigation and under French law anyone who might come under legal scrutiny is presumed to be innocent.
Questions over the roles of a notary and an auctioneer
As well as the major figures, the investigation is also looking into the role of intermediary characters who are nonetheless important during an inheritance case: the public notary and, concerning the artworks that need to be catalogued and valued, the auctioneer. In this affair it turns out that the two people concerned are at the top of their respective professions.
The first, Marc Cagniart, is today the president of the chamber of notaries in Paris. The second, Francois de Ricqlès, a man described by Le Figaro newspaper as an “elegant aesthete”, spent 18 years as head of the French branch of well-known auctioneers Christie's; in particular he oversaw the historic Pierre Berge/Yves Saint-Laurent sale in 2009 at Le Grand Palais in Paris.
The future will decide if, in the eyes of the law, the notary Marc Cagniart and the auctioneer Francois de Ricqlès worked in a standard way in the Berri case, if they were negligent or, worse, complicit in the supposed offences.
In the original complaint that sparked the judicial investigation, Thomas Langmann's lawyers pointed the finger at their “culpable indulgence”, portraying the two professionals as interested parties in the alleged abuses in the Berri inheritance.
For example, when performing his notarial cataloguing duties in 2009, Marc Cagniart is said to have spent between just 12 and 42 seconds on each work. According to the formal legal complaint, this suggested there had been a script agreed in advance as part of a falsified inheritance. When contacted by Mediapart to respond to these claims, the notary declined to comment, saying he was bound by professional confidentiality.
The notary works in the interests of the inheritors by trying to get them to pay the least death duties in a reasonable way.
The value of the artworks in the Berri estate was officially estimated at 64 million euros, already a considerable sum. But according to the terms of a tax reassessment in November 2020 this was in reality a massive underestimation, by at least around 15 million euros. The auctioneer François de Ricqlès himself implicitly acknowledged this in a conversation on July 12th 2016 with Thomas Langmann which the latter recorded.
“With such large inheritances the notary works in the interests of the inheritors by trying to get them to pay the least death duties in a reasonable way,” said François de Ricqlès, talking of “current practices in estate declarations” when it comes to “underestimating” the value of assets for tax purposes. The nature of some insurance documents from 2010 seen by Mediapart also suggest there was a massive underestimation of the value of the artworks included in the Berri estate.
Work carried out by officials from the tax fraud investigations office the Direction Nationale des Enquêtes Fiscales (DNEF), who looked at the case in parallel with police detectives, have since led to the probe's scope to be broadened to include “laundering the proceeds of tax fraud”. According to a source close to the case, this took place after the DNEF agents alerted prosecutors in Paris under article 40 of France's criminal law procedure code.
Neglected political issue
But along with the undervaluation of the works of art that were declared, in recent months the police investigation has been trying to identify items that were not declared to the authorities at all. A treasure-trove of artworks is suspected of having escaped the estate and thus the inheritance taxes that goes with it. This is what lies at the heart of the Berri inheritance case, an issue which a socialist Member of Parliament, Christine Pirès-Beaune, has decided to raise at a Parliamentary level.
There is, undeniably, a desire to protect this heritage.
A member of the National Assembly's finance committee, this MP has fought for years for better tax oversight of privately-owned high-value artworks, which have long been excluded from wealth tax in France - or property wealth tax as it now is. “Even under [President] François Hollande I came up against a brick wall. There is, undeniably, a desire to protect this heritage, on the grounds that Paris should remain an art capital, when this is simply like any other inheritance,” said Christine Pirès-Beaune.
“But the worst thing perhaps is the lack of transparency that exists when works of art are passed on, for example in the context of an inheritance,” said the MP, who says that unfortunately her words are met with polite indifference or even political hostility. “We have a register for car registration documents, why don't we have a national register for artworks which would allow the tax authorities to do their job better and to know who bought what and when? It wouldn't even be difficult to put into place!” said the MP from the Puy-de-Dôme département or county in central France, who is frustrated by the current situation.
The MP also laid down an amendment at the end of 2021 with the aim of providing more resources to tax inspectors so they could get access to some files of professionals involved (notaries, auctioneers and insurers) to check on the good faith of declarations about works of art for inheritance purposes. But the amendment was rejected, largely on the grounds of the need to protect professional confidentiality.
Mediapart has meanwhile approached several Treasury civil servants, all of them members of the main trade union for the sector, Solidaires-Finances Publiques. They have raised the alarm over a chronic reduction in staffing levels inside the tax inspectorate at the Direction Générale des Finances Publiques (DGFIP), the main Treasury department. Citing reports from the French Senate and the independent public finances watchdog the Cour des Comptes, the civil servants say that more than 3,000 jobs were lost – out of a total of 9,000 posts – between 2012 and 2022.
They also confirm that there are structural obstacles to tax inspections into works of art that are caught up in inheritance cases. “How can you calculate taxation on the basis of property that you don't see?” they ask. There is clearly a legal void here which, when it comes to taxation matters, sometimes reflects a political desire to do nothing.
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- The original French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter
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