Lactalis and its boss were raided on Tuesday February 6 as part of a gigantic tax fraud case. According to information from Worldthese operations were carried out by police officers from the National Brigade for the Repression of Tax Delinquency in at least three separate locations: at the headquarters of the dairy giant in Laval (Mayenne), in its offices at the Montparnasse tower (Paris), as well as in the private mansion of the CEO, Emmanuel Besnier, in 7e district of the capital.
Lactalis is the subject of a preliminary investigation by the National Financial Prosecutor’s Office (PNF) for aggravated tax fraud and laundering of aggravated tax fraud. His tax organization would have allowed him, according to a judicial source, to evade “several hundred million euros” of taxes. “The installations are of a high level, very ingenious and very sophisticated”, comments another source. When contacted, Lactalis management indicated that the searches “went off peacefully”specifying that they “are part of a procedure relating to old facts”. According to our information, they date back to the period 2009-2020.
The PNF investigation was launched in 2018 after press revelations. Back to back, Media, Ebdo, Days And Mediapart had revealed that the world’s leading dairy products group, founded in 1933 in Laval, had several financial subsidiaries in Belgium and Luxembourg, suspected of artificially sucking up the group’s profits to reduce its tax base in France.
In 2020, the investigation site Disclosed estimated the damage to French public finances at 220 million euros, for the period 2013-2018 alone.
A parallel tax investigation
The PNF also received a denunciation in 2019 from the Confédération paysanne, which has long criticized the multinational for its practices, responsible, according to it, for destroying the balance of the dairy sector. The agricultural union has accused the industrial group having “set up a particularly complex intra-group re-invoicing system as well as a fictitious share purchase system”.
A source close to the investigation indicates that the investigations “do not relate at this stage to the personal taxation of Emmanuel Besnier”. But the group’s reference shareholder, who controls the company with his brother, Jean-Michel, and his sister, Marie, is no less central in the matter, due to the close overlap between the holding companies of family and those of the company. “As the group is extremely concentrated in the hands of a few shareholders, the investigations are also interested in the head of the company”indicates a judicial source.
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