The 73-year old heiress to the Nina Ricci perfume and fashion fortune has been convicted of tax fraud and is the first person to face a jail sentence for seeking to evade taxes by using an offshore account in HSBC’s private Swiss bank
A Paris court has sentenced Arlette Ricci to three years in prison, two of them suspended. She has also been fined €1m (£720,000), and had two properties worth €4m (£2.9m) confiscated. Ricci’s daughter was also convicted and given an eight-month suspended sentence.
Ricci was accused of hiding around €18m (£13m) from the French tax authorities using accounts and offshore companies based largely in Panama. She has been ordered by the court to pay millions in back taxes for the period 2007-2009, with the exact amount to be determined at a later date.
The court said she had shown ‘a particularly determined willingness for more than 20 years’ to hid money in Swiss bank accounts.
Ricci has denied the accusations, saying what she did was legal. She is the first of around 50 French nationals named on the leaked Falciani list of names of HSBC account holders to face trial over tax evasion. Her lawyer said she had been made an example of, and the sentence was ‘extremely severe’.
Withers special counsel Tessa Lorimer coomented: ‘This high profile conviction demonstrates that despite the HSBC data leak disappearing from the news agenda for a while, European tax authorities have been busily working on the data, and there is still strong political will to pursue HSBC's Swiss accountholders.
‘The long-reaching ramifications of the HSBC disclosure will continue to be felt for some time to come, and this certainly won't be the only prosecution.’
HMRC was given details of the leaked list in 2010 and identified around 1000 British taxpayers for investigation over non-payment of taxes. However, the UK tax authorities have so far brought only one criminal prosecution, a move which has been heavily criticised by the Public Accounts Committee (PAC).
Margaret Hodge, who chaired the PAC investigation into the HSBC Swiss bank, said the French decision showed the British authorities were ‘pathetic’.
‘The French are showing that you can defend the taxpayer’s interest much more aggressively by challenging rich individuals and multinationals. All we ask is that they pay a fair share of tax,’ Hodge said.
