It’s an invitation in the form of an ultimatum. In a press release published on Wednesday January 18, the National Financial Prosecutor’s Office (PNF) asks French customers of the Helin International group, a pharmacy accused of having organized the tax evasion of hundreds of European customers, to “bring closer to the Public Prosecutor’s Office as soon as possible”.
Revealed in 2018 by the weekly The Obs, the “Dubai Papers” brought to light a tax evasion scandal, based on thousands of internal documents from the company Helin International FZE, based in Ras Al-Khaïma, in the heart of the United Arab Emirates. The data makes it possible to make the link between the identity of the clients, the name of their offshore companies registered in tax havens and the details of the associated bank accounts. Arrangements hidden from the tax authorities of the countries of residence thanks to a system of nominees.
While the press revealed this system of tax evasion, “the PNF was the recipient, by anonymous transmissions, of two computer media” of the same data, specifies the financial prosecutor, who opened a preliminary investigation for aggravated laundering of tax evasion on September 5, 2019. The data was analyzed in collaboration with the General Directorate of Public Finances which filed forty-two complaints against taxpayers French for tax evasion.
False invoices
The investigations were entrusted to the Bercy judicial finance investigation service and to the central office for the fight against corruption and financial and tax offenses of the judicial police.
To date, the investigators have carried out seventy-two searches and around fifty hearings and police custody. Among the fraudsters, some inherited, on the death of their parents, bank accounts hidden abroad but chose to continue underground. Other clients are business leaders who have set up, with the complicity of the Helin group, a system of false invoices in order to puncture the cash flow of their companies and then recover the misappropriated sums from an offshore bank account. The money was finally given to customers in France by “distributors” of the Helin International group in the form of envelopes of cash or pre-loaded anonymous bank cards.
Four clients of the Helin group have already been sentenced to suspended prison sentences and several million euros in fines after reporting to the authorities and having admitted the facts of laundering tax fraud. They have also regularized their situation with the tax authorities. “Other procedures are nearing completion and will also give rise to prosecutions in the coming months”specifies the PNF.
The invitation to Helin customers to “bring closer” of the Public Prosecutor’s Office aims precisely to accelerate this process. This “last chance call”, according to a legal source, is a voluntary choice of communication which should enable magistrates, police officers and civil servants to save time and resources in the search for the hundreds of identified French customers of the Helin group. In exchange, the latter are offered the possibility of legal treatment which will take into account their approach to denunciation and their level of cooperation. They have until April 30, 2023 to make themselves known. Conversely, “failure to have manifested itself within this period, it will be taken into account in the context of the treatment”the statement concludes.
A file entitled “To make disappear”
This approach is reminiscent, on another scale, of the Service for processing rectifying declarations, opened from 2013 to 2017 by the General Directorate of Public Finance following the Cahuzac affair. This “tax sobering cell”, which allowed tax evaders to reveal their situation and escape criminal prosecution, has regularized more than 50,000 files of tax evaders in four and a half years.
The judicial investigation around the “Dubai Papers” is unprecedented in terms of the quantity and precision of the information in the hands of the PNF and the tax administration. The hundreds of thousands of internal documents offer an unprecedented insight into the functioning of the Helin group. The tables make it possible to accurately trace the life of offshore companies, their creation and the details of their activities. Other files trace the financial flows from bank accounts to the remittance of money to customers in France. All this data was concentrated in a file entitled “To make disappear”, which was finally used for the revelations of the press.
Beyond the situation of the clients, the justice system also has precise elements on the role of the “business introducers”, these lawyers, accountants or notaries who have knowingly offered their clients the services of the Helin group in exchange a commission on the amounts evaded. The organizers of the fraud are also in the sights and could be worried by justice. The Franco-Belgian banker Henri de Croÿ, suspected of having been at the head of the Helin group, moved to Colombia in August 2021, according to Lobs.