The trial of the “Dubai Papers”, a huge system of international tax fraud, opens this Monday in Paris

The organization offered rich taxpayers turnkey solutions to hide and recover their money under the radar of the tax authorities: the “Dubai Papers” trial, which opens Monday in Paris for a month, offers a rare insight into the workings of the international tax fraud industry.

Until December 3, not simple taxpayers but 13 people and three companies representing the back room of a fraud as adept at juggling countries as with millions will appear before the criminal court: directors of the organization, employees, business sponsors, nominees.

Tried for complicity in tax fraud and organized gang money laundering, as well as criminal conspiracy, the defendants are being prosecuted for having allowed more than a hundred wealthy French taxpayers to evade at least 54 million euros in taxes between 2007 and 2018. Other proceedings are underway in Belgium and Switzerland.

A level of detail rarely achieved

At the center of what the National Financial Prosecutor's Office (PNF) describes as a "large-scale tax fraud and money laundering operation" is the Swiss company Jawer, relocated to the United Arab Emirates from 2007 to circumvent the lifting of Swiss banking secrecy, and operating from the free zone of Ras el-Khaimah, an emirate north of Dubai, under the name Helin.

Revealed in September 2018 by the magazine L'Obs, this affair enters into a level of detail rarely achieved for an international financial file of this magnitude. Because the procedure is nourished by manna that fell from the sky: thousands of internal documents from Jawer/Helin submitted anonymously on a USB key to the PNF in January 2019.

This mass of messages and financial documents has shed an unnatural light on a world with precisely the opacity of goodwill, in which business codes sometimes intersect those of organized crime: exchanges with clients via encrypted messaging, use of aliases in internal communications, money discreetly given to taxpayers via suitcases of notes or prepaid cards.

The prince and the patron

For French tax residents alone, the prosecution estimates that Jawer/Helin managed more than 200 million euros in assets, hidden via 658 offshore companies, on behalf of 322 taxpayers. The funds were scattered in banks across the planet, from the Bahamas to Mauritius, from Hong Kong to Puerto Rico. The pharmacy also offered companies the opportunity to artificially reduce their tax base by sending them fictitious or overvalued invoices for fees or subcontracting. It then allowed them to recover through indirect channels the sums taken out of their accounts.

At the head of this compartmentalized structure distributed between several countries was the Belgian prince Henri de Croÿ, 68 years old, alias “A3” in internal communications. For the PNF, its expertise in international taxation, its social networks in the European aristocracy and upper bourgeoisie as well as its knowledge of the functioning of justice, due to previous legal disputes in Belgium, “help to largely explain the extent and sustainability of this fraud”. Henri de Croÿ “does not contest the elements which are opposed to him today. The point of this hearing, however, will be to establish a clear boundary between what he knew and what he did not know, between what is attributable to him and what is not his responsibility. From there, the court will have to define an appropriate sentence,” his lawyer Antoine Vey told AFP.

Also on the dock are his brother and associate Emmanuel de Croÿ and the respectable British patron Géraldine Whittaker, whose charitable trusts are said to have been used to hide the money of certain clients. In addition to the organization's employees, its most important business contributors - tax lawyers and accountants - are also summoned to appear before the criminal court. Before the trial, more secondary defendants chose guilty plea procedures and received suspended sentences of up to three years in prison and a fine of 240,000 euros.