Real estate scam of nearly one billion euros, the Apollonia file has been tried since Monday in Marseille for more than two months, with hundreds of cheated victims who hoped to build up a loweritical heritage.
With 15 defendants including a lawyer and three notaries, some 760 civil parties, 110 lawyers and a file of 110 volumes, the extraordinary trial room of the criminal court, installed in the courtyard of the former Muti Military Barracks, will have rarely been also filled.
On the defendants’ benches, the Badache family, founder of the Apollonia heritage management company, based in Aix-en-Provence (Bouches-du-Rhône): Jean, former merchant, his wife Viviane, esthetician by profession, and their son, Benjamin, a time in control of the company.
In the room, many former doctors today retired, with “irreparable human damage, suicides, deaths, depression”, reports to the press Jean Imbert, vice-president of the association of victims created in this case which arrives “finally” before the courts, 17 years after the first complaints.
There are thus several cases of family houses sold, personal bankruptcies, people finding themselves with the legal minimum, children forced to give up inheritances, he reports.
Pascale Hoffmann, widow Cucuz, holds in her arms a photo of her husband, now deceased, and her youngest son, whom he barely known. She is gynecologist-obstetrician at the hospital in Grenoble, was a general practitioner. A colleague puts them in touch with Apollonia.
The salesperson offers them “a dream”: being able to build an exceptional real estate heritage without contribution, which should allow them to leave humanitarian aid while having sheltered their four children.
– Simple “aggressive commercial maneuvers”? –
The medical professions were particularly targeted because they have means, little free time and a profession based on confidence and a certain idea of public service, lists this woman with a gentle look, dressed in black, with some journalists.
Apollonia offered to acquire lots of real estate programs eligible for the Professional Furnished Listers (LMP), tax -advantageous.
The mechanism seemed all the more attractive since “the combined effects of these tax advantages and income from the rental of goods were supposed to” guarantee customers “self -financing of acquisitions”, summarizes the investigating judge in this file.
But the entry ticket to reach this “Grail” was high, the investor having to justify more than 23,000 euros per year of his rental activity to be an LMP. An imperative that has led to the multiplication of acquisitions, for amounts between 800,000 and four million euros by investors.
Acquisitions financed most of the time by loans. For Pascale and her husband, it will be three million debt: “We have been sold 13 lots, some of which are not built”.
Apollonia, who managed everything for his customers, contracts for them loans from several banks, going so far as to falsify their bank statements to make up their growing debt. And these find themselves little in front of insurmountable debts.
A moment implicated, several partner banks of these assemblies are now civil parties.
Pascale’s husband will be very angry with it and no longer coming to sleep, he self -fell, up to a fatal dose. Today “nothing” will return her “life before” to his wife, she just wants to “be able to live more freely”.
Because very concretely, because of this story, she could never finish the construction of their house and has been registered several times in the banking prohibition file. Fortunately, her bank agreed to leave her credit card, which she could have refused.
In the end, from 1997 to 2009, the company Aixoise will have sold 5,305 lots for nearly 950 million euros. The 15% commission (on the sale price) received allowed the Badache spouses to lead Large Train.
But, for one of their lawyers, Me Frédéric Monneret, “it is advisable to distinguish what we describe as aggressive maneuvers, which would be lies within the framework of a commercial argument, with fraudulent maneuvers”, which they “have always disputed”.
The Badache couple like all co -ownerships face up to 10 years in prison and a million euros fine.
Posted on March 31 at 4:27 p.m., AFP
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