Ten years after the fact, it was starting to look like two “cold-cases” with no hope of ending. But the junction of the files of the murder of a carbon tax crook and the murder of a billionaire allowed two Parisian judges to incriminate the sulphurous businessman Arnaud Mimran as a sponsor.
A businessman with questionable liabilities …
In 2008 and 2009, the forty-something Arnaud Mimran carried out a VAT fraud by playing on carbon quotas. According to the Court of Auditors, this scam cost at least 1.6 billion euros to the tax authorities.
What was the scam? The idea was to buy CO2 quotas tax-free abroad before reselling them in France at a price including VAT. The funds were then invested in another operation. VAT never reached the state.
… questioned again
But the setbacks with justice do not end there. The businessman has been indicted in two separate murder cases.
The first concerns Samy Souied. In September 2010, this figure of the “scam of the century on the market for CO2 emissions allowances in 2008-2009”, was shot dead at Porte Maillot in Paris. The killers flee on a scooter with the stolen plate.
A year later, in October 2011, Claude Dray, billionaire who made his fortune in perfume and then luxury real estate, was found shot dead in his luxurious villa in Neuilly-sur-Seine. No break-in, no theft, and plenty of mobiles.
But what is the connection between the two cases? Well, he could be called Arnaud Mimran. Each of the two investigations seems at first to vegetate for many years, despite some “tips” and suspicions that relate to Arnaud Mimran, respectively ex-business partner of the first victim, and ex-son-in-law of the second.
Between 2019 and 2020, two anonymous pieces of information relaunched the two surveys.
All the elements against Mimran
The first designates Mimran as sponsor and one of the brothers of the Khider family, close to the financier, as “intermediary” in the murder of Souied. The second accuses a member of the same Khider siblings, suspected of “collecting debts” for the “golden-boy” of the time, of having participated “in another execution on the instructions of Arnaud Mimran to access the pavilion of the victim”. What establish the link with the Dray file.
Party animal, the fan of big cars and poker sprees in Las Vegas had a financial dispute with Souied valued at 60 million euros by the witness of 2013. Another fact that puts the chip in the ear of the investigators: Souied was shot wearing Maillot, where Mimran had asked him to wait for him to give him a ring intended for his companion.
Mimran denies the accusations
With Claude Dray, Mimran had a stormy relationship, especially after a difficult separation with his daughter. But he had patched up with it a few weeks before the assassination, which could have given him information on access to Mr. Dray’s home, before leaving it again some time later.
The swindler however denied before the judges. On April 15, he defended himself in a short statement: “I was never the sponsor or the author of the assassinations of my ex-father-in-law in 2011 or of Samy Souied in 2010,” he said. he says.
According to him, his implication is a means of “preventing him from being released on May 9”, when he will have served his sentence, but the investigations are still ongoing.
Other unresolved assassinations
The junction of the two files could well allow progress on other unresolved assassinations, potentially linked to this circle of the carbon tax scam.
Arnaud Mimran, who never ends with justice, will appear next June at the assizes with five other defendants for the kidnapping and kidnapping with a view to extortion of a wealthy Swiss financier in January 2015.
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