The victims are many. Twenty of them are civil parties in this case of stolen or tampered with cars, sold between 2014 and 2016. Fiat 500s mainly, imported from Italy. The seller, prosecuted for fraud, money laundering, forgery and use of forgery, concealment of property, concealed work, participation in a criminal association, was summoned to the Thionville Criminal Court on Tuesday. He is now 35 years old. Fitted shirt, fitted suit jacket, polished shoes, he answers everything and too bad if he sometimes misses the point. The tone is innocent, the gestures and the gaze assured. He does not recognize the shenanigans described. He maintains that he never knew of the illegal origin of the vehicles he sold from Mondelange and Fameck.
In 2014, a prefecture in central France reported a registration request for a vehicle declared stolen in Italy. The investigation goes back to the Moselle company that imported it. Investigations reveal dozens of fraudulent cars put on the market at competitive prices, sold to individuals or garages. The certificates of ownership are wobbly, the chassis numbers have been made up. Leaning on the bar of the court, the former manager concedes a single dispute, denounced by a client and which he had tried to hide. “I didn’t want this episode to harm my new society,” he explains.
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More than 200,000 euros in damages
“There are a lot of manipulations that raise questions in this file”, reminds him the president of the court, relying on the procedure. He cites in particular an exchange of messages with an administrative officer of the prefecture to whom the defendant asks to solve the problem against a “bif”, money. “It’s like in a crowded restaurant, it makes things easier,” said the former manager at the helm.
His attitude will anger a lawyer from Rouen who came to defend an unhappy buyer. The council denounces “a scandalous levity”. He recounts the galley of the victims, the difficulty of insuring a tampered property, the impossibility of reselling a stolen vehicle, “the five years of credit to repay a car that rots in the garden”. Compensation for the moral and material damages of civil parties greatly exceeds €200,000.
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“A swindler”
The public prosecutor takes no detour. “Sir is a crook. […] There was nothing artisanal about his activity,” sums up Brice Partouche. He supports his indictment and then claims two years in prison, one year of which is firm, as well as a ban on managing and a fine of €15,000 for the main defendant.
The ex-entrepreneur is not the only one before the court. His brother is also being prosecuted, suspected of having participated in the trips to repatriate the cars, among other things. His ex-girlfriend is worried about money laundering. His current wife also elsewhere.
Fifth defendant in this case: the Italian supplier who evaporated. The prosecutor requires eighteen months firm, 10,000 euros in criminal fine and the maintenance of the arrest warrant against him. This other character in the story, absent from the debates, has almost been forgotten. “However, he is at the origin of the file”, notes the manager’s lawyer at the helm. She pleads for release on the facts of fraud, criminal association, money laundering. Certainly, his client is not an exemplary manager, but he is not a thug. “It pisses me off for the civil parties,” he repeats.
