2023-10-02 13:33:00
The cases against the director of the French luxury brand group LVMH, Bernard Arnault, for alleged money laundering involving the Russian oligarch Nikolai Sarkisov, are “unfounded,” said his lawyer.
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The Paris prosecutor’s office had indicated, on Thursday, September 28, that an investigation into suspicions of money laundering against Sarkisov has been open in France since 2022 and that the investigations were expanded to include real estate transactions involving Arnault.
According to the same source, a report from Tracfin, the financial intelligence unit of the Ministry of Economy, on Arnault and Sarkisov’s operations in Courchevel was included in the process.
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The newspaper Le Monde reported, citing Tracfin, that the Russian billionaire bought 14 properties there in 2018 for 16 million euros through a complex setup of companies in France, Luxembourg and Cyprus.
The official buyer is the collective society La Fleche, through which it acquired other properties on the site for 2.2 million euros.
Bernard Arnault
Bloomberg
To finance these operations, Arnault, who is the second richest man in the world, would have paid Sarkisov 18.3 million euros before repurchasing all of La Fleche’s shares, becoming the beneficial owner of the assets.
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“The change of beneficial ownership of real estate acquisitions tends to mask the exact origin of funds, to complicate operations and the identification of the actual purchaser, and to reflect a desire to conceal the beneficial ownership of all acquisitions, i.e. Bernard Arnault,” according to the Tracfin report cited by Le Monde.
But lawyer Laffont questioned: “Who can seriously imagine that Mr. Bernard Arnault, who for 40 years built the first French and European company, would dedicate himself to laundering money to expand a hotel?”
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