As far as the French justice system is concerned, Arnaud Mimran is one of the “organisers” of what has been dubbed the hold-up of the century: the massive carbon trading fraud that cost French taxpayers around 1.6 billion euros in 2008 and 2009. The French businessman is suspected, too, of being behind the kidnapping of a Swiss financier in 2015 in a bid to extort 2.2 million dollars. The 44-year-old poker player's name has also been cited in connection with several unsolved murders, including that of his former father-in-law.
Yet Arnaud Mimran, who denies any wrongdoing, is also a man who likes to surround himself with well-known figures and personalities. Mediapart has discovered that the businessman's network of friends and acquaintances over the last 15 years has included Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, French boxing champion turned actor and comedian Farid Khider, the well-known French singer and actor Patrick Bruel, prominent businessman Pierre Botton, the French Member of Parliament Meyer Habib and many others.
Mimran, then, has carved out his own niche in the corridors of the French justice system and in some of the more shady areas of Paris, as well as having a high-profile network of friends. Any notoriety, however, is unlikely to upset a man who, according to friends, adores Al Pacino's portrayal of the megalomaniac Tony Montana character in the film Scarface. Here Mediapart throws the spotlight on the world of Arnaud Mimran.
- THE CARBON TRADING FRAUD ALLEGATIONS
The European Union's emissions trading system (ETS) was introduced in 2005 using the 'cap and trade' principle to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. But in the early years the system was exploited by criminals who made billions of euros from VAT fraud. Criminals registered to be able to trade carbon permits in the ETS and then started buying carbon permits in one EU country from another, free of VAT, before selling them on with the VAT added. But instead of passing that VAT on to the relevant tax authority, they vanished without trace – taking the VAT money with them.
Arnaud Mimran is said by the French judicial authorities to be one of the “organisers” of such fraud in France and is due to stand trial in Paris in May 2016, along with other defendants, accused of defrauding a total of 283 million euros. He denies the charges. In all, carbon trading frauds are said to have cost French taxpayers some 1.6 billion euros in unrecovered VAT. The total loss to European taxpayers of the various carbon trading frauds committed by different gangs around the continent is said to be five billion euros.
Mimran has also been placed under formal investigation – one step short of being charged – for his alleged involvement in the kidnapping of a wealthy Swiss financier in 2015 and of trying to extort 2.2 million dollars from him. He also denies these claims.
- THE UNSOLVED MURDERS
Amar 'blue eyes' Azzoug, Samy Souied, Claude Dray and Albert Taieb have two things in common: they were all murdered, and all had links either with the money from or the alleged instigators of, the massive carbon trading fraud mentioned earlier. Azzoug was shot at a brasserie in a Parisian suburb on April 30th, 2010, Samy Souied was shot six times and killed in Paris on September 14th, 2010, billionaire property owner Claude Dray was found shot dead at his home in the well-heeled Neuilly-sur-Seine suburb of Paris on October 25th, 2011, while Albert 'Bébert' Taieb was stabbed to death in a Parisian block of flats on April 8th, 2014. The first two men had links with the carbon trading fraud, while Claude Dray was Arnaud Mimran's father-in-law. Taieb was killed while in the company of a man called Cyril Mouly, a first cousin of Mardoché 'Marco' Mouly who will be one of Mimran's fellow defendants in the carbon trading fraud trial in May.
When he was being questioned in November 2011, after the third of the murders, Arnaud Mimran was told by one detective: “There's starting to be a lot of people shot dead around you. What do you think about that?” Mimran, who strongly denies involvement in any of the murders, replied: “What do you want me to say? For Samy, it can be explained by his lifestyle and by the company he kept. Concerning my father-in-law, I don't know, I don't understand. I've nothing to do with that, if that's what you want to know.”
Meanwhile, to this day, none of these four murders have been solved. No one has been placed under formal investigation in connection with them. Indeed, no one who carried out any of the attacks or who ordered them has ever been officially identified. For some, these murders represent the face of a new form of French criminality. “You are, here, at the heart of French criminality's nuclear reactor,” one senior police officer told Mediapart.
- THE PATRIARCH, JACQUES MIMRAN
The Mimrans are perhaps more of a clan that just a family. Apart from Arnaud there is his brother Benjamin, a prosperous businessman, sister Sophie who is often associated with her brothers, and at the top of the pyramid Jacques, the father. He is regularly portrayed in the gossip sheets as a resectable and very wealthy big player in the world of property. This is quite true: he was deputy director general at the giant Vinci construction group.
But Jacques Mimran's career has not always been so tranquil. In 2002 he was convicted at a court in Créteil, south-east of Paris, in a major corruption case known in France as the 'TGV Nord affair'. This involved bribes and false billing surrounding the building of the high-speed TGV railway linking Paris to the Belgium border. Of the 20 people tried, Jacques Mimran received the heaviest sentence, a three-year suspended jail term and a 200,000 euro fine. The prosecutor, who spoke about the “moral abuse” highlighted by the case, had in fact recommended that Mimran be sent to prison. At the time Mimran was boss of a firm called Deschiron, later taken over by Vinci.
Astonishingly, this conviction did not prevent Jacques Mimran from being awarded the Légion d'honneur in July 2006. It was given to him in person by the then-budget minister Jean-François Copé, a member of the right-wing government of President Jacques Chirac. According to the authorities who oversee the awarding of this honour, the Grande Chancellerie de la Légion d’honneur, Mimran's conviction did not appear in the file used to determine his eligibility. It only came to light later, leading to a disciplinary procedure and a decree on May 19th, 2009, formally stripping Jacques Mimran of the honour. A spokesman for Jean-François Copé, who is now seeking to be the Right's presidential candidate in 2017, the former minister “did not know anything of Jacques Mimran's judicial situation at the time he gave him the Légion d'honneur”. The spokesman added: “After all, he was someone he'd only met two or three times in his life.”
- THE PRIME MINISTER, BENJAMIN NETANYAHU
The Mimrans know the importance of maintaining contacts in high places. Photographs obtained by Mediapart show that the family's influence extends well beyond France's borders, and in particular to the current Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. According to several witnesses the Mimran family has helped the Likud party – Netanyahu's party - and at the beginning of the 2000s lent the family's flat on avenue Victor-Hugo in Paris's 16th arrondissement to 'Bibi' as he is known in Israel. Arnaud Mimran, seen here in this photo (see below) in the summer of 2003 with a relaxed, open-shirted 'Bibi' by the sea in Monaco, has always shown a willingness to maintain this closeness.
Enlargement : Illustration 2
At the time Netanyahu occupied the posts of foreign minister and later finance minister, having already been prime minister from 1996 to 1999. Apart from ideological closeness, were there any other benefits from this relationship? Arnaud Mimran's lawyer Jean-Marc Fedida did not reply to Mediapart's questions on the issue. However, it is worth noting that the carbon trading fraud, which is probably the biggest of its type seen in France, was carried out mostly by Franco-Israeli wheeler-dealers. Some of them chose to be domiciled in Israel, a country which is not known for its compliance when it comes to judicial cooperation. This was the case with Samy Souied, who was connected with Mimran, and who was murdered in Paris in 2010.
THE FORMER BUSINESS PARTNER, PIERRE BOTTON
Arnaud Mimran started his business career at a prosperous property company, 3 A Trade. He was in partnership with financier Édouard Tarbouriech (now dead following an illness) who sometimes joined the Mimran family when they dined with Netanyahou. But in 2000 Mimran became embroiled with the American judicial authorises over an insider trading offence, leading him and his accomplices obliged to repay 1.2 million dollars.
A few months later Arnaud Mimran was back, this time linked with another person known to the French courts: Pierre Botton. This businessman had been involved in the so-called 'Noir-Botton' affair in the 1990s. This had led to the downfall of the former mayor of Lyon, Michel Noir, for whom Botton was an over-generous financial supporter and campaign director as well as being his son-in-law. Arnaud Mimran's name appears on several documents lodged at the commercial court having been, sometime around 2005, a member of the board on a company called ETC Agencement, whose chairman was Pierre Botton. The business, in which the Mimran family invested money, specialised in the layout of chemist shops.
“I split from Arnaud around seven years ago, not on very good terms inasmuch as my company had to go into administration,” says Pierre Botton, who today works to improve prison conditions, a subject of which he has first hand knowledge having been jailed in 1996. “But I have absolutely no animosity with regards to Arnaud who is, I think, one of the most intelligent boys that I've met. I don't know if all that they say about him is true, I have no idea. I know his family well, I like them and they have helped me a lot at certain times. If all they say about him is true it's very sad that he has used his intelligence for that. Quite honestly I find it hard to believe and, and the same time, it would seem that the information is quite strong,” he adds.
- THE MP, MEYER HABIB
Enlargement : Illustration 3
Among the politicians with whom Arnaud Mimran has maintained strong ties in France is French MP Meyer Habib of the centrist UDI party, as demonstrated by this photo (see above) taken in a Paris synagogue. It shows the MP tying the traditional Jewish tefillin around Arnaud Mimran's arm. Habib is a jeweller by profession and it was also his company that made the skull and crossbones ring that Arnaud Mimran was personally giving to Samy Souied at the moment a gunman on a scooter rode up and shot the latter six times with 7.65mm calibre bullets at Porte Maillot in Paris on September 14th, 2010. Contacted by Mediapart the MP said: “I have nothing to say to you. Carry on, do your job. This sad affair is in the hands of the justice system. I don't want to say anything.”
- THE CARBON TRADING PARTNER, MARCO MOULY
The name of Mardoché 'Marco' Mouly, aged 50, who was born in Tunis, is now indelibly associated with that of Arnaud Mimran. From the beginning of May they will be sitting together on the benches of the accused at the criminal court in Paris, for one of the big trials arising from the 2008-2009 carbon trading fraud. The pair are considered by the authorities to be among three “organisers” of the fraud: the third was said to be the murdered Samy Souied.
Enlargement : Illustration 4
In July 2015 the anti-corruption judges carrying out the investigation, Guillaume Daieff, Serge Tournaire and Renaud Van Ruymbeke, stated in their final report that Arnaud Mimran had made use of all his knowledge of money laundering to carry out the carbon trading fraud. The judges meanwhile say that Marco Mouly is a “great expert in fraud”. While in custody Moyly was thus able to explain the differences between “ kosher CO2”, which involved stealing the VAT, and “non kosher CO2” which involved being a broker on the carbon markets. Mouly also detailed the dividing up of profits between Samy Souied and mysterious “Russians”, all of it being transferred via accounts based in tax havens, notably Hong Kong.
Marco Mouly, who has already been convicted of fraud in relation to advertising inserts and VAT – though on nothing like the scale of the carbon trading scheme – is clearly not a faint-hearted individual. When in July 2010 he was searched on his return from Switzerland with 100,000 euros cash hidden in a box of Kleenex tissues, he gave investigators a passport belonging to one of his brothers and, cheekily, even gave officials a statement under that name.
The judges in charge of the carbon trading investigation also noted that in 2012 Mouly had agreed to a loan of 4 million euros to Thierry Leyne, ex-business partner of former International Monetary Fund boss Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who committed suicide in Tel Aviv in 2014. Leyne's business dealings with the former IMF head are now the subject of a juridical investigation in Paris.
- THE POKER PARTNER AND SINGER, PATRICK BRUEL
On November 3rd, 2011, ten days after the murder of his billionaire father-in-law Claude Dray, Arnaud Mimran was questioned by a police detective sergeant. “Do you play card games such as poker? Do you move in card-playing circles? Who do you play with?” To which Mimran replied: “Yes, before, I played a lot. But I've played a lot less in the last six months because the games are less interesting. I always played with the same people.” The first name cited by Mimran was that of the French singer and actor Patrick Bruel, who is also a well-known poker player.
However, the two men are clearly more than just fellow card players. In November 2012, a year after that police questioning, Patrick Bruel attended the bar mitzvah held for Arnaud Mimran's eldest son – Claude Brauy's grandson. The Mimran family did not hold back on the event: there was a reception at the Shangri-La hotel followed by a sumptuous party with Ruinart champagne at the Pavillon d'Armenonville venue centre on the edge of the Bois de Boulogne in west Paris. Here international stars such as Puff Daddy, Pharell Williams and Akon sang to hundreds of guests whose invitation 'cards' to the bash had been iPads.
Enlargement : Illustration 5
In photographs obtained by Mediapart one can see Patrick Bruel playing guitar and singing, to the delight of guests, then later in the night he can be seen arm in arm with Mimran (see above). Several people close to the singer, including the agency that represents him – which did not reply to Mediapart's requests for a comment – have recently tried to alert him about the company he keeps.
In addition to Patrick Bruel, Arnaud Mimran had told detectives that he also played poker regularly with Patrick Pariente, one of the founders of the Naf Naf fashion brand. “I haven't taken part in the [poker] circles for three years,” Mimran said. “With my friends we played every Monday in a flat in avenue Montaigne in Paris belonging to Patrick Pariente. There years ago I used to frequent the Haussmann [poker] circle and the Aviation circle,” he said.
THE BOXER, FARID KHIDER
“I'm not Arnaud [Mimran]'s muscle, I'm not his dogsbody, he doesn't pay me to go and hit people.” Those are the unequivocal words of former boxing champion, comedian and actor Farid Khider in a statement to police on June 15th, 2015, when he was being held in custody along with Arnaud Mimran. The two men, who are close, had been arrested in connection with the kidnapping and holding of a well-known Swiss financier to extract more than two million dollars, and at the same time and in the same places, to have faked Mimran's abduction.
According to the judicial file, telephone taps show that Mimran was the real beneficiary of an account in Dubai where the money ended up, and that Farid Khider was in permanent contact with the kidnappers at the time of the events. These events took place between January 15th and 21st between Boulogne in northern France, where the financier was snatched by people posing as police officers, and Aubervilliers in the north-east suburbs of Paris, where he was taken and manhandled. It is worth noting that the leader of the kidnappers, Sabir Titouh, known as 'Titax', was murdered during this period, at 10.20pm on January 19th, 2015, by two men who were waiting for him at his home at Taverny north of Paris. Investigators have little doubt that there is a link between the kidnapping and Titax's murder.
Like Arnaud Mimran, Farid Khider – one of whose brothers was shot dead in 2011 – spent several months in custody in this affair, firstly at Fleury-Mérogis prison, then at Fresnes prison, both south of Paris. This was until January 2016 when, against the advice of the prosecution authorities, the court of appeal in Paris decided to free both men, who are now under strict judicial monitoring. They are also forbidden to contact each other. Both have been placed under formal investigation – one step short of charges being brought – for “kidnapping and unlawful imprisonment as part of an organised gang”, “extortion as part of an organised gang”, “criminal conspiracy” and “money laundering”.
MYSTERIOUS POLICE OFFICERS
Have some police officers crossed the line in relation to Arnaud Mimran, as persistent rumours suggest? The businessman himself has done nothing to play down the suggestion. In relation to the kidnapping allegations, an employee of Mimran gave a witness statement in which he said that in April 2015, when his boss was in temporary custody, he had been approached by two men, including one called 'Seb', to make sure he continued to withdraw money from the account in Dubai, which had not been blocked by judges. “They seemed very well informed as to the state of progress of the investigation. Were they perhaps police officers?” asked the witness. Far from denying this, Mimran said: “'Seb'? He's a policeman who works at the DCRI [editor's note, now known as the DGSE, the French domestic intelligence service],” he told investigators.
In relation to the Samy Souied murder case a man called Cyril Astruc – referred to as the “billion euro man” in some police documents – and who has been investigated in connection with several frauds, also made some intriguing comments when questioned by a judge in Paris in December 2014. “I met Arnaud Mimran in 2013,” he told the judge. “He boasted about having strong police protection in France ...they are things he spoke about freely in front of me to show how he was protected.”
In March 2014, meanwhile, Samy Souied's brother had also talked about special police favours when he was summoned before a judge alongside Mimran's carbon trade fraud co-defendant Marco Mouly. “Was your cousin Steve D. paid for information coming from the police services, in particular the fraud squad?” Souied's brother asked Mouly during the encounter in front of the judge. “I myself made use of his services for 1,000 euros and I even went with him to the police station at Bobigny [north-east of Paris] where in front of me the police officer typed on his machine to find out my situation. The police officer was two metres tall,” added the brother. Mouly did not deny the claim. When the judge asked “do you have anything to say?” Mouly simply replied: “No.”
HIS NEW PARTNER TAMARA PISNOLI AND THE MAFIA
Having divorced his wife Anna Dray, Claude Dray's daughter, Arnaud Mimran then lived with the Paraguayan model Claudia Galanti, from whom he also later separated. He is now with an Italian woman called Tamara Pisnoli. These would amount to nothing more than details about Mimran's private life, over which incidentally the gossip sites in Italy and France often poke fun, were it not for the fact that Anna Dray's father was murdered, that Claudia Galanti was mentioned in connection with the Silvio Berlusconi 'bunga bunga' scandal and that in 2008 Tamara Pisnoli's 48-year-old father Massimo was killed in what was described as a “classic Mafia murder”. Tamara Pisnoli was herself accused of having organised the kidnap of a businessman from Rome in July 2013 in order to obtain a ransom of 200,000 euros.
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- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter