Nineteen defendants, mainly former Romanian legionnaires, were sentenced on Wednesday to up to five years in prison for a vast organized real estate gang scam and money laundering between 2007 and 2015.
The fraud consisted of taking out loans from credit institutions by providing false documents, which had enabled the acquisition of more than 80 properties via nominees or front companies. Their rapid resale after work often not carried out allowed artificial capital gains.
Depicted as the orchestrator of the scam, Sébastien Celea, 41, enlisted in the Foreign Legion from 2001 to 2007, was sentenced to five years in prison with a warrant of arrest as well as a permanent ban on running a business and exercise a commercial or industrial profession.
The prosecution portrayed him as the organizer and facilitator of a system from which he derived significant financial benefits. His wife was sentenced to one year in prison under house arrest under electronic surveillance and a fine of 15,000 euros.
Another former Romanian legionnaire was sentenced to three years in prison and fined 100,000 euros. He was placed under arrest warrant. The nominees, former comrades in arms of Sebastian Celea, were sentenced to sentences ranging from one year in prison suspended with a fine of 10,000 euros to one year in prison including six months suspended.
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Numerous confiscations including an apartment in Romania were ordered by the court.
Two notaries from the South-West were acquitted of fraud in an organized gang but given a one-year suspended prison sentence for complicity in money laundering. The court did not uphold the prohibition to practice required against one of them, nor the offense of participation in a criminal association targeting certain defendants.
He completely released two of them, in particular an employee of a bank whom the prosecution presented as a banking facilitator.