There was an expression of both rage and humiliation on the face of Patrick Balkany, the 70-year-old French conservative party veteran and mayor of a large Parisian suburb, as he left a Paris court on Thursday, after prosecutors had called for him to be sentenced to seven years in prison and barred from holding public office for ten years.
As Balkany, whose more than four decades-long political career is tainted by multiple scandals and who is standing trial on charges of corruption, money laundering and laundering the proceeds of tax evasion, passed the two public prosecutors on his way out of the Paris courthouse, he growled at them, “You are as hateful as you are mediocre”.
The trial, due to end next week after the court hears the closing arguments of the defence, is the second to involve Balkany and his wife over the past month. Isabelle Balkany, 71, was absent from both for health reasons, following her suicide attempt shortly before the hearings opened.
Both trials are centred on the accusation that the couple hid assets worth 13 million euros from the French tax authorities, in foreign accounts and and using offshore accounts and shell companies to dissimulate their real ownership of luxury properties in France, Morocco and the Caribbean island of Saint-Martin. But this second trial involves added charges against Patrick Balkany of corruption, and money laundering the proceeds of corruption and tax evasion.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
The Balkany couple have claimed that a large part of their wealth hidden in accounts outside France came from a heritage abroad from both Patrick Balkany’s father and his wife’s parents.
Four other defendants in the case are accused of helping in the scam, including a Saudi businessman who denies the allegation that he sought Balkany’s favour in a property development scheme in the latter's political fiefdom in exchange for financing the acquisition of one of the couple’s villas.
Balkany, mayor of Levallois-Perret, a large suburb west of Paris where his wife is also deputy-mayor, has for long been a prominent figure in the French Gaullist conservative movement – he was a founding member of the RPR party in 1976, the ancestor of today’s Les Républicains party – and played a key role in its political stranglehold over the Hauts-de-Seine département (equivalent to a county) that wraps the south-western margins of the capital. A longstanding friend and political ally of former French president Nicolas Sarkozy, whose power base was built in the same region, Balkany has served as a local Member of Parliament (MP), and as a vice-president of the département council.
In 1996 he was handed a 15-month suspended jail sentence for fraudulently placing his own domestic staff on the Levallois-Perret town hall payroll, during his first mandate as mayor of the town between 1983-1995, when he was also barred from holding public office for two years. He was re-elected in 2001, and has remained mayor of the town ever since.
In 2005 he was acquitted of alleged influence peddling in a vast secret funding scam that involved contracts handed to construction companies to build public housing in the Hauts-de-Seine in return for secret political financing. Balkany’s local political ally and right-hand man Didier Schuller was handed a jail sentence over the affair. Schuller, who claims he took the fall for Balkany and that the latter betrayed him when he attempted a return to politics in 2013, provided early evidence against Balkany in the five-year investigations that led to the current trial.
In their three hours of summing up on Thursday, the prosecutors, representing the PNF, the financial crime division of the French prosecution services, described Balkany’s behaviour as a “betrayal” of his mandate as mayor of Levallois-Perret, a “violation of democracy”, and “an outrage regarding the 600,000 elected representatives, most of whom are unpaid” who sit on the country’s municipal councils.
The trial has yet to hear the final arguments of the defence which will begin on Monday, but if the presiding magistrates follow the prosecutors’ demand in their verdict due in September, Balkany will be jailed immediately even if he takes the case to appeal.
The sentence demanded (which fell short of the maximum ten years allowed by law) was met with consternation by Balkany’s lawyer, Éric Dupond-Moretti, who exclaimed, “We’re in a madhouse”. Speaking to reporters outside the courtroom, Dupond-Moretti, one of France’s most high-profile defence lawyers, added: “Against this man, who is perhaps today the representation of absolute evil in this France that is becoming puritan, is demanded what is sometimes not sought in crimes of blood.”
Meanwhile, the prosecutors called for Isabelle Balkany to be given a four-year suspended jail sentence, a fine of 500,000 euros – which is on top of other fines and back payments demanded of the couple from the tax authorities. She, the prosecutors noted, had admitted the couple's ownership of the villa in Saint-Martin.
Among the four other defendants is the Balkany couple’s son, Alexandre, who the prosecutors argued had helped his parents in concealing their wealth – he signed false rental contracts for the villa in Morocco – through “filial devotion”, and who had been “led into this adventure by his parents”. The prosecution called for him to be fined 100,000 euros.
The remaining three include lawyer Arnaud Claude, a former partner with Nicolas Sarkozy (who is also a qualified lawyer) in a law firm, Arnaud & Sarkozy, set up in 1987, and who served as a legal advisor for the town of Levallois-Perret. The prosecution described him as “the pilot of the money laundering operation” who “organised the secrecy” of the structures set up to conceal the assets of Patrick and Isabelle Balkany, and called for him to be handed a four-year prison sentence, with twoyears suspended (which could theoretically allow Arnaud, unlike Balkany, to escape jail), to be barred from exercising the profession of lawyer, and the confiscation of his Normandy residence.
As for Jean-Pierre Aubry, a longstanding right-hand man to Balkany in Levallois-Perret, where he held the post of director general of the suburb’s public-private consortium in charge of town planning, the prosecution described him as an “essential cog” in the fraud, serving as a frontman in the ownership of their luxury villa in Marrakesh, in Morocco; the riad was owned by a Moroccan company, which in turn was owned by a Panama-registered firm, which in turn was created by a Swiss-based trust in the name of Aubry. The prosecutors called for him to be given a sentence of three years in jail, one suspended, a fine of 150,000 euros, a ban on serving as a public service employee and a five-year ban from occupying a managerial post.
Finally, Saudi multi-billionaire Mohamed Al Jaber, whose business activities includes hotels and property development, is accused of bribing Balkany, notably by financing the purchase of the Moroccan villa in return for preferential treatment by Balkany in a property development project in Levallois-Perret. This involved a plan to build a massive hotel and office complex in two tower blocks overlooking the river Seine, but which Al Jaber would finally pull out of. Al Jaber is also accused of bribing Balkany with trips in his private jet and with luxury gifts, all of which Al Jaber denies. The prosecution argued that he had “knowingly corrupted an elected politician”, calling for him to be handed a sentence of four years in jail – two of them suspended – and a fine of 150,000 euros.
The trial is due to end on June 20th.
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- The French version of this report can be found here.
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Below: an extract from Mediapart's live-streamed programme of debates this week, in which guests join Mediapart journalists to discuss the background and the lessons of the Patrick Balkany trial (in French).