After four years of investigation, the legal proceedings are accelerating and coming to an end in the “Dubai Papers” file. Revealed in 2018 and 2019 by The Obs And French Radio, this leak of internal data from the company Helin International, based in the United Arab Emirates, offered an unprecedented dive into the functioning of a structure whose activity seems to have been largely fraudulent. Helin’s clients were mostly French and Belgian heirs and entrepreneurs who were able to hide tens of millions of euros from the tax authorities through clandestine bank accounts backed by offshore companies and trusts in tax havens.
In France, the National Financial Prosecutor’s Office (PNF) opened an investigation for aggravated money laundering of tax evasion in September 2019, after having had access to company documents. Since then, justice has carried out more than seventy searches and around fifty police custody, mainly against French customers and intermediaries.
Beyond the fraudsters, the police officers of the national tax crime repression brigade focus on the employees of the Helin group and its leader, the Franco-Belgian financier Henri de Croÿ, whose central role has been highlighted thanks to leakage of documents. Mr. de Croÿ was heard at the end of April for five days by the police in Belgium in the presence of French investigators, as a free suspect. At the time of the press revelations, he had denied involvement in any illegal schemes, and admitted only operations of“optimization”.
Several clients already condemned
The thousands of internal documents of the Helin International group, including The world was able to become aware, however show fraudulent practices and outline the role of conductor of Henri de Croÿ, involved in all operations: from meeting clients to setting up offshore companies and organization of remittances to customers of sums of cash in France, drawn from their offshore bank accounts.
Since September 2021, seven of the group’s clients have also acknowledged the acts of money laundering or aggravated money laundering of tax evasion. Six of them benefited from a procedure of appearance on prior recognition of guilt (CRPC), the French version of the American guilty plea. They accepted suspended prison sentences ranging from nine months to two years and fines of between 80,000 and 1.75 million euros.
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