“All of this was put in place to create a tax exemption system. “Max-André Pick, 1st deputy (DVD) to the mayor of Roubaix, in the North, confessed to the facts on Thursday before the Lille criminal court. With him, thirteen other defendants, including the mayor of Roubaix, Guillaume Delbar, are being prosecuted, some for breach of trust, others for fraud by an organized gang. In this affair, all the protagonists know each other, by a bond of kinship or friendship. The trial should last two days to dissect the responsibilities of each other in participating in a system of tax exemption via political micro-parties, deemed “fraudulent” by the prosecution.
The principle was quite simple. A political party, created for an election campaign, collected donations. Part of these donations could then be transferred to the accounts of an association, under an agreement signed with the latter. Then the said association was responsible for reimbursing donors up to 85%, “sometimes even 100%” of donations, according to the president of the court.
More than 230,000 euros at stake
In the meantime, donors had been able to tax two-thirds of the amounts initially paid to the political party. In all, more than 230,000 euros have thus fueled the mechanism. Between 2015 and 2020, the cumulative tax credits could amount to up to 39,000 euros for some defendants.
Successively, two political micro-parties, “Vivement Tomorrow”, between 2015 and 2018, then “Vivre Otherwise Locally”, in 2019 and 2020 reproduced the same pattern of money transfer with two associations, “Association citizens engaged”, then “3F”, suspected of being only “screen associations” to allow the reimbursement of donations.
Financing the electoral campaign in Roubaix
Among the defendants is also Pascal Legrand, former deputy mayor of Comines between 2011 and 2020. The latter was the president of the micro-party “Vivement Tomorrow”, created in 2013 to finance the electoral campaign in Roubaix. He is also being prosecuted for obstructing the auditor’s audits.
Before the opening of the hearing, the defense lawyers asked for the reclassification of the facts as “aggravated tax fraud”, considering that it was not “an organized gang scam”. Because, in the event of prosecution for tax evasion, “the State does not have the right to come to the hearing to ask for damages”, underlined the lawyer of Max-André Pick, Me Cosima Ouhioun.
On the other hand, for Me Xavier Normand-Bodard, representing the interests of the State, “all of these facts go far beyond the simple qualification of tax fraud” because “it is a real system of tax exemption”.