“Loan from a friend”, “mistake”, or a desire to “illegally save taxes”? Five Cesars actress Isabelle Adjani was tried in absentia on Thursday in Paris on charges of aggravated tax fraud and money laundering, a case the court will decide on December 14.
The National Financial Prosecutor’s Office (PNF) requested an 18-month suspended prison sentence and a €250,000 fine, with immediate effect, as well as two years of disqualification. The defense demanded acquittal, but responded with a version that “contradicts” the prosecution.
The audience extended until late in the evening without the 68-year-old actress and singer, who was in the United States. Her defense asked to postpone the trial, citing in particular a “severe medical condition,” but the court rejected this request, claiming doubt about the actress’s “true intention” to come to the stand.
The president recounted at length, to a nearly empty room, that the investigation began in 2016 after Isabelle Adjani’s name appeared in the Panama Papers. The revelations that ultimately led to no prosecution, but highlighted other doubts.
The Financial Public Prosecutor affirmed at the beginning of the indictment that “her fame was neither an additional reason nor an obstacle to prosecution. Before she was a public figure, she was a citizen subject to duties.”
The judge rebuked Isabelle Adjani for “systematically seeking to reduce her taxes between 2013 and 2017, and instead of saving legally in her lifestyle (…) she chose to save her taxes illegally.”
For the prosecution, the actress’s main domicile, professional activity and centers of economic activity were in France, not in Portugal, in 2016 and 2017: she should therefore have paid €236,000 in income tax in France.
Moreover, according to the Financial Prosecutor’s Office, the two million euros paid by Senegalese businessman and International Olympic Committee member Mamadou Diagna N’Diaye in 2013 was not a loan, but a “disguised donation.”
Prosecutors said the loan contract signed between them, which included no interest or guarantees, was “fictitious” and allowed the actress to evade 1.2 million euros in transfer taxes.
The Portuguese National Police finally requested that she be charged with money laundering because she received 119,000 euros from an offshore company to an “undeclared” American bank account, and the amount was then transferred to Portugal.
One of the defense lawyers, Stephane Babonneau, recalled the journey of “one of the greatest French actresses,” believing that “no, Isabelle Adjani was not treated like an ordinary litigant.”
“Whatever she did, she was wrong!” He was indignant, denouncing the “intent” and “beliefs” of the prosecution.
He stressed that “everything has gone” since 2013, the year in which a “downward spiral” occurred for the actress: her company Isia Films was “emptied of 800 thousand euros” due to a “scam”, a company that was targeted for a “reorganization”. Like Isabelle Adjani “in my personal capacity.”
“In the context of very great financial hardship,” “in a state of depression,” she “found help” from her “friend” Mamadou Diagna Ndiaye, her son’s “godfather of the heart,” via a “declared loan” for which she received “10 years” to repay, the lawyer said.
Regarding her tax residency, “she made a mistake because she followed the advice given to her,” the council confirmed, recalling that she paid the amounts due through a transaction with the tax authorities.
The lawyer also said that the €119,000 had been transferred by his “lawyer in Geneva” and used to “donate to his housekeeper’s family, so she can acquire property in Portugal.”
“He is a person who trusts and sees that his trust has been betrayed, and he is not at all a person who would seek to defraud,” Olivier Pardot added, estimating that the public “without Isabelle Adjani, without Mr. Ndiaye, enforces innocence.”
