The French-based firm that manages the financial affairs of Qatari Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, Qatar’s former ruler and the father of its current Emir, is under investigation by the Paris public prosecutor’s office for suspected money laundering in relation to tax evasion, according to documents obtained by Mediapart and French weekly news magazine Marianne.
The preliminary enquiry, which will ascertain whether there is sufficient evidence to open a judicial investigation to decide whether charges should be brought, was opened last summer and handed to the French police financial crime squad, the brigade financière, Mediapart can reveal.
The decision by the public prosecutor’s office to open the probe was prompted by information and documents passed to it by a former employee of the firm, French Properties Management (FPM), in January 2015, to which Mediapart has gained access.
The case centres on payments totalling nearly 2 million euros made to a French-based and internationally-renowned interior designer, Alberto Pinto, via a Swiss bank account held by an offshore entity based in the British Virgin Islands. Pinto had been hired to decorate Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani’s 124-metre luxury yacht Katara.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
According to the information handed to the public prosecutor’s office, the person who oversaw the payments made to Pinto was the managing director of FPM, Chadia Clot. But importantly, at the time of the financial transactions, Sheik Hamad, now 64, was Qatar’s ruling Emir, and the orders for the payments to Pinto were made “On behalf and in the name of the state of Qatar”.
Sheik Hamad ruled the oil-rich Gulf state from 1995 until 2013, when he abdicated in favour of his son Tamim.
Chadia Clot is in effect the ‘right hand’ for Sheik Hamad’s multiple investments in France, which include mostly luxury property (notably buildings and hotels in central Paris), but also the acquisition of the grand Paris department store chain Le Printemps. She is also one of the administrator’s of the sheik’s Dutch-based holding company Mayapan, which owns FPM.
This secretive 68-year-old (a rare interview with her was published in 2013 in French weekly L'Obs), was born in Palestine by the name of Jihan Sanbar (she is a cousin of the Palestinian poet Elias Sanbar), and became a French national after marrying a French engineer when she resided in the Lebanon.
Clot reportedly became close to Sheik Hamad when she ran a Paris art and antiquities business in Paris which was frequented by the sheik and his second wife, Sheikha Mozah. Clot was appointed as the director of FPM as of its creation in 2002 in which role she is also cited in two other, separate French judicial investigations; one is a probe into suspected "misuse of company assets" surrounding the sheik’s 1.7-billion-euro purchase of the Printemps store chain in August 2013, and the other is into suspected “corruption and influence peddling” over the purchase on his behalf in October 2014 of a five-star hotel, the Vista Palace, in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin on the French Riviera.
Enlargement : Illustration 2
The events leading to the investigation into payments made to interior designer Alberto Pinto began in 2006, when the latter was hired to fit-out the 124-metre yacht, the 15th-largest in the world, then under construction for Sheik Hamad by German shipbuilding firm Lurssen.
Along with a helicopter landing pad, the vessel reportedly has a swimming pool, Jacuzzi and gym. Delivered to the sheik in 2010, it regularly attracts the attention of tabloid newspapers during Hamad’s cruises around the Mediterranean.
Pinto’s contract to decorate the Katara, which was codenamed “Crystal” during its construction, was negotiated by his sister and business partner Linda Pinto, a manager of the Alberto Pinto Design firm headquartered in Paris. Pinto’s agreed fee was 4.3 million euros, excluding expenses and shipyard costs, to be paid by Mayapan via an account opened with a branch of the Qatar National Bank in Paris.
The first instalments of the payments made to Pinto were transferred to his company’s account with the Crédit Agricole bank in Paris. But, according to the information passed on to the Paris public prosecutor in January last year by the former FPM employee, in the summer of 2007 Linda Pinto requested that other instalments be paid into an account held with the Edmond de Rothschild bank in Geneva. The account there was held by a shell company based in the British Virgin Islands, called Kalika Assets Holdings Inc.
On July 3rd 2007, Kalika Assets Holdings sent the sheik an invoice, via FPM, for 500,000 euros in part-payment for work on the yacht “Crystal” (see below). Several FPM internal documents supplied to the Paris public prosecutor’s office, obtained by Mediapart, indicate that Kalika Assets Holdings was a front for Pinto, as in the payment order repproduced below. One of these describes payments made to Kalika as corresponding to “the fees” of Alberto Pinto for the “yacht Crystal”. Another, sent to Sheik Hamad’s office, read: “We have noted that the invoice emitted by Kalika Assets Holdings Inc. replaces the preceding invoice emitted by Alberto Pinto Design for the sum of 500,000 euros.
A total of four invoices were sent by Kalika Assets Holdings between 2007 and 2008, totalling 1.9 million euros and paid into the holding company’s Swiss bank account.
Alberto Pinto died in November 2012 at the age of 69. His interior design firm continues to operate from Paris. Contacted by Mediapart, Linda Pinto replied by email that she did not wish to comment on the subject of this report. Her lawyer told Mediapart that anything she had to say would be given to the ongoing official investigation.
According to the information supplied by the former FPM employee in January last year, it was Chadia Clot who personally validated the payments. One of the payment orders (see below), made out on July 11th 2007 and obtained by Mediapart, is signed by Clot and Sheik Hamad’s legal advisor, Adel Sherbini, in which it is clearly stated that the sum is paid “On behalf and in the name of the state of Qatar”.
According to the FPM whistleblower, Clot gave strict instructions within the company that the payments made to the account in Switzerland were to be kept confidential, and demanded that documents referring to Kalika Assets Holdings Inc. should be destroyed. She allegedly erased the trace of the cash transfers to Geneva from the records of the Qatari royal palace, the Amiri Diwan.
The accounts sent to Doha detailing payments made to Alberto Pinto’s Paris firm allegedly show a total sum of 2.4 million euros, while the total of the contract signed with the interior designer was for 4.3 million euros.
Chadia Clot did not answer Mediapart’s request for an interview.
Meanwhile, the FPM whistleblower also supplied the Paris public prosecutor’s office with information concerning the company’s dealings with another high-profile, Paris-based architect and interior designer, Jacques Garcia.
In 2010, he was awarded a contract to decorate a property belonging to Sheik Hamad situated in the plush 7th arrondissement (district) of Paris. The first downpayment on Garcia’s fees, an advance of 632,500 euros, was paid into the Paris account held by the French designer’s firm, Décoration Jacques Garcia, at the Neuflize OBC bank on February 18th 2010.
The FPM whistleblower claims that Garcia’s firm was aware of the arrangement made with Pinto and as a result requested a similar overseas payment. In July 2010, FPM was issued with an invoice for work carried out in the same property in the 7th arrondissement, made out in the name of “The Notorious Architects and Decorators”. The invoice gave the payment address as an account with Citibank in New York.
According to research by Mediapart, The Notorious Architects and Decorators is a firm based in the US state of Wyoming, where companies can register without declaring the identities of their shareholders. According to documents for the firm recorded with the local company register, the firm is domiciled at the address of the offices in Switzeralnd of lawyer Patrick Huguenin (the only name that appears), whose legal firm is called Budin & Associés.
Mediapart contacted Huguenin by phone to talk about what we began by describing as his “French client […] the decorator Jacques Garcia”. Huguenin replied “Yes, well…tell me”. But the lawyer subsequently commented: “Maybe Mr Garcia is a client, maybe he isn’t”, and refused to make any further comment for what he said were reasons of “professional secrecy”.
Mediapart attempted to contact Jacques Garcia about the allegations through the offices of his firm’s director, but the designer failed to respond.
To date it is unclear whether the invoice from The Notorious Architects and Decorators company was paid by FPM.
-------------------------
- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse