PARIS: A Paris court on Friday sentenced the former head of France’s domestic knowledge organization to four years in prison, two of them suspended, on charges of using his safety contacts for personal gain including by obtaining private information for luxury giant LVMH.
Bernard Squarcini, 69, known as “le Squale” ( the shark ), will appeal the verdict, said Marie-Alix Canu-Bernard, one of his lawyers.
LVMH key Bernard Arnault, France’s richest person, testified during the trial but was never charged and denied any information of a system to safeguard the leisure class.
The former head of the DCRI security services ( since renamed the DGSI) was likewise ordered to pay a fine of 200, 000 dollars and given a ban on professional actions relating to knowledge or consulting companies for five decades.
The sanctions handed out by the Paris criminal court were broadly in line with what prosecutors were demanding.
Squarcini is however expected to never set foot in prison with the two-year jail term set to be served with an electronic tag, as is often the case in France with short sentences.
The charges relate to the period when Squarcini headed the DCRI from 2008 to 2012 and to his subsequent return to the private sector, when he worked largely for LVMH as a consultant.
Investigators say that as early as 2008, DCRI officers were deployed to try to identify a blackmailer targeting Arnault.
Other allegations relate to spying on Francois Ruffin, a former journalist who is now a leading left-wing lawmaker– and, from 2013 to 2016, the leftist newspaper Fakir that Ruffin founded.
” I would like to point out that I am here as a witness, a simple witness, and that my indictment was never considered by the investigating magistrates”, Arnault told a hearing when he testified in November.
” I was completely unaware” of the alleged scheme, he added.
