The Court of Cassation on Wednesday rejected the appeal of Rifaat al-Assad, uncle of Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, making final his sentence to four years in prison in France for “ill-gotten gains”.
The former vice-president of Syria, now 85, was sentenced on appeal in Paris, on September 9, 2021, to the same sentence as at first instance, the court also confirming the confiscation of a heritage valued at 90 million euros.
The younger brother of former Syrian President (1971-2000) Hafez al-Assad was found guilty of organized gang laundering of Syrian public funds and aggravated tax evasion laundering between 1996 and 2016.
He was also sentenced for the concealed work of domestic employees.
In this investigation initiated in 2014 after complaints from the NGOs Sherpa and Transparency International, two mansions, dozens of apartments in the wealthy districts of the capital, an estate with a castle and stud farm, offices and a property in London were notably seized.
After the decision of the Court of Cassation on Wednesday, the value of these assets, definitively confiscated, should be returned to Syria within the framework of the new mechanism for the restitution of assets fraudulently acquired by foreign leaders, adopted by Parliament in 2021.
Former pillar of the Damascus regime, Rifaat al-Assad was the head of the elite internal security forces, the Defense Brigades, which notably suppressed in blood an Islamist insurrection in 1982 in the city of Hama. This earned him a nickname, “the butcher of Hama”.
In 1984, he left Syria after a failed coup against his brother, Hafez al-Assad, joining Switzerland and then France. In the fall of 2021, the octogenarian returned to Syria after more than three decades of exile, announced a pro-government media.
Decorated with the Legion of Honor in France in 1986 for “services rendered”, Rifaat al-Assad is threatened with a trial in Spain for much broader suspicions of “ill-gotten gains” concerning some 500 properties.
Your projects at the best rate thanks to our comparison of consumer loans
He is also being prosecuted in Switzerland for war crimes committed in the 1980s.
This is the second case of “ill-gotten gains” judged in France, after that of Teodorin Obiang, the eldest son of the President of Equatorial Guinea, definitively sentenced in July 2021 to three years in prison suspended and 30 million euros. euro fine.
Other investigations are underway, targeting in particular the family of the former president of Yemen Ali Abdallah Saleh or that of the former Gabonese leader Omar Bongo Ondimba, nine of whose children were indicted in the spring and in July.