Judge Luc Monin in 2005 in front of the Brussels courthouse
The Belgian magistrate arrested on Tuesday in a hotel in Paris is judge Luc Monin, the newspaper Le Soir said on Wednesday after obtaining confirmation from his lawyer. He was sentenced to 5 years in prison for fraud and blackmail. He was wanted by the Belgian justice.
The Belgian judge, absent at a hearing in November 2020, was sentenced by default on April 20, 2021 by the Liège Court of Appeal to the maximum penalty of five years in prison for having defrauded savers of around 500,000 euros and for participating in blackmail against a surgeon and a French criminal lawyer. The latter had also paid the sum of 50,000 euros, details Le Soir.
Luc Monin was placed in judicial detention on Tuesday and was to be presented to the Paris public prosecutor’s office to be notified of the arrest warrants against him before appearing later before the investigating chamber of the Court of Appeal. of Paris, in charge of extraditions.
Marc-Léon Levaux, the lawyer for the 63-year-old Belgian judge, believes that “What is happening is unfair. The Court of Cassation dismissed his appeal even though the Advocate General had considered his trial to be unfair. He found himself sentenced to the maximum sentence without being able to defend himself. I learned today that the public prosecutor’s office of Liège used disproportionate means to have him arrested, like a bandit. The French courts will have to find that Luc Monin did not benefit from a fair trial in Belgium”continues the lawyer.
But his advice is not necessarily optimistic. “I expect French justice to want to maintain good relations with its Belgian counterpart”explains Marc-Léon Levaux to the newspaper Le Soir.
An appeal to the European Court of Human Rights has been filed by the Dinant magistrate, but this procedure does not suspend the prison sentence.
Contacted by the Belga agency, the general prosecutor’s office of Liège did not wish “communicate information about it, because of their personal nature”.