At the end of the preliminary investigation and after having studied the arguments of the defence, the national financial prosecutor’s office sent the French actress to the five Caesars, Isabelle Adjani, a summons to appear on October 19, 2023 before the criminal court of Paris for tax evasion and money laundering.
“Isabelle Adjani disputes the charges and has not committed any offence”, reacted to Agence France-Presse (AFP), her lawyers Masters Julie Freal-Saison and Cédric Labrousse, denouncing “unfounded and disproportionate” prosecutions. .
The 68-year-old actress and singer is accused of defrauding the tax administration in 2013, 2016 and 2017 through two mechanisms. She concealed “a donation of two million euros from Mamadou Diagna NDiaye, under cover of a loan, which enabled her to evade 1.2 million euros in transfer duties” and she fictitiously domiciled in Portugal, thus allowing him to “evade 236,000 euros in income tax”, a judicial source told AFP on Tuesday.
Mamadou Diagna NDiaye is an influential Senegalese businessman, president of the Senegalese National Olympic and Sports Committee (Cnoss) and member of the International Olympic Committee (IOC). He is also chairman of the organizing committee for the Youth Olympic Games (YOG), scheduled for 2026 in Senegal.
“The French tax administration is trying by all means to reclassify this loan as a donation despite the repayments made for years”, denounced the lawyers of Ms. Adjani who “is therefore surprised by this relentlessness”. Mr. NDiaye is also the godfather of the actress’s son, they said.
Panama Papers
The actress will also be tried for money laundering, acts committed between the United States and Portugal in 2014. She is suspected of having “passed through an American bank account not declared to the tax authorities the sum of 119,000 euros from an offshore company with unknown beneficial owner and intended for investment in Portugal”, developed the judicial source.
The investigation was opened in 2016 following the revelations of the Panama Papers on a system of tax evasion via accounts in tax havens. Isabelle Adjani was cited as the holder of a company in the British Virgin Islands.
The weekly L’Express had revealed the existence of this investigation carried out by the Central Office for the Fight against Corruption and Financial and Tax Offenses (Oclciff) around this offshore company Deckert Investments Limited founded with the support of the Mossack firm Fonseca and registered in July 2014. If the investigations did not make it possible to identify financial flows in connection with this offshore company, they did however reveal facts of tax evasion and money laundering, specified the judicial source.
Indictment in 2020 in another case
A leading actress of the 1980s and 1990s, Isabelle Adjani left her mark on the cinema by playing fragile and passionate heroines, from Adèle H. to Queen Margot via Eliane in L’été murderer. After a sensational debut, the actress is becoming rarer in the cinema but creates the event at each of her performances in the cinema, in the theater or on television, as in the hit series Captain Marleau.
Recently, it is by a return to the song that she made people talk about her: the interpreter of Pull marine written by Serge Gainsbourg forty years ago, is preparing a second album for the end of the year. In the cinema, we saw her last year playing an actress nostalgic for her past success in Masquerade by Nicolas Bedos and a diva in Peter von Kant by François Ozon.
In another legal proceeding, Isabelle Adjani was indicted in October 2020 for fraud after the complaint of a former consultant who accused her of having sent her false proof of reimbursement of the 157,000 euros she owed him. The boss of the Bestimage paparazzi agency, “Mimi” Marchand, whose real name is Michèle Marchand, is also being prosecuted in this case for complicity in fraud.