Rifaat al-Assad, uncle of Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, was sentenced on Thursday by the Paris Court of Appeal to four years’ imprisonment for having fraudulently built up assets in France valued at 90 million ‘euros.
The 84-year-old former vice-president of Syria, who has lived in exile since 1984, was convicted of “organized gang money laundering, embezzlement of Syrian public funds and aggravated tax evasion” between 1996 and 2016 Absent when the judgment was issued, he had not attended the trial.
Syrian state money
As at first instance, the one who presents himself today as an opponent of his nephew Bashar al-Assad – in power since 2000 in Damascus – sees all the real estate concerned confiscated by the courts. His defense immediately announced a cassation appeal. In this case, justice seized two mansions, dozens of apartments in Paris, an estate with a castle and stud farm in the Val-d’Oise as well as offices in Lyon, to which can be added 8.4 million euros corresponding to goods sold.
These assets were held by Rifaat Al-Assad and his relatives through companies in Panama, Liechtenstein and Luxembourg. Like the Criminal Court in June 2020, the Court of Appeal considered that the defendant’s fortune came in particular from the Syrian state coffers, in particular from funds that his brother Hafez al-Assad had agreed to release in exchange for his exile.
The absent defendant
Rifaat al-Assad, now a British resident, was also convicted of aggravated tax fraud laundering, as well as covert work by domestic workers. On the other hand, he was released on facts covering the period 1984-1996, for legal reasons. Over the course of the two trials, his defense had argued that Rifaat al-Assad’s money had a “perfectly lawful” origin: “massive aid” from the crown prince and then king of Saudi Arabia, Abdallah, between the 1980s and his died in 2015. The defendant was absent from the two trials, prevented for medical reasons, according to his defense.
This is the second case of “ill-gotten gains” judged by the French courts, after that concerning the vice-president of Equatorial Guinea, Teodorin Obiang. Former head of the elite internal security forces, the Defense Brigades, Rifaat al-Assad was at the heart of the Damascus regime, participating in the Hama massacre in 1982, perpetrated to suppress an Islamist insurgency. After a failed coup, he left Syria in 1984 with 200 people, settling in Switzerland and then in France.
Heritage of Rifaat al-Assad: the money does not come from Syria, says his son