© thomas coex
Thierry Gaubert in Paris, in June 2020.
Champagne. Sentenced in June 2020 to three years in prison for tax evasion and aggravated money laundering, Thierry Gaubert, former handyman of Nicolas Sarkozy at the town hall of Neuilly as at Bercy, saw his sentence greatly reduced, Tuesday afternoon by the Court of Appeal of Paris: eighteen months, half less. His lawyers, who feared a warrant of committal to the bar, synonymous with immediate incarceration, could breathe a good blow at the end of the judgment, redoing the calculations on the various possible remissions of sentence in order to avoid him a future imprisonment.
Thierry Gaubert, whose politico-judicial CV is beginning to be heavily loaded, risked a lot, due to a revocation of the suspended sentence pronounced during a previous conviction in 2012. Ten months in prison suspended for breach of trust, in the case of 1% housing Hauts-de-Seine. Followed by another criminal salvo in June 2020: four years in prison, two of which are closed in the Karachi case (he appealed).
great leniency
Three years firm, therefore, pronounced in parallel for tax evasion: 8.9 million euros subtracted from the tax authorities, between the Bahamas, Panama and the Virgin Islands. Including a huge hacienda of 1,000 square meters in Colombia, where this neo-banker, within the Savings Banks, after having officially left Sarkozia, liked to receive a few French dignitaries passing through.
If he was finally spared detention (notwithstanding a possible appeal in cassation, then passage before a sentence enforcement judge), it is because, unlike Claude Guéant or Patrick Balkany, imprisoned one after the other so as not to not having returned the embezzled money, Thierry Gaubert regularly reimburses the tax authorities, at his own pace: of the almost 9 million evaded, he would have returned half of it to the Public Treasury, according to his lawyers. In its great leniency, the Court of Appeal thus canceled in the wake of its prohibition to manage a company, precisely to allow it to continue to reimburse. A form of encouragement for his redemption, without necessarily going through the prison box…