The Court of Cassation on Wednesday rejected the appeal of Rifaat al-Assad, the uncle of Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, making his four-year prison sentence in France for “illicit gains” final. The former vice president of Syria, now 85 years old, was sentenced on appeal in Paris, on September 9, 2021, to the same sentence as in the first instance, the court also confirming the confiscation of assets valued at 90 million euros.
The younger brother of former Syrian President (1971-2000) Hafez al-Assad was convicted of laundering Syrian public funds by organized gangs and money laundering for aggravated tax evasion between 1996 and 2016. He was also convicted of undercover work of domestic employees.
The value of the seized assets will be returned to Syria
In this investigation, which began in 2014 after complaints from the NGOs Sherpa and Transparency International, two mansions stand out, dozens of apartments in the wealthy neighborhoods of the capital, a farm with a castle and stud farm, offices and a building in London.
Following the decision of the Court of Cassation on Wednesday, the value of these assets, definitively confiscated, must be returned to Syria within the framework of the new mechanism for the restitution of assets acquired fraudulently by foreign leaders, approved by Parliament in 2021. In Paris, social housing was inaugurated on these sites a few months ago.
Rifaat al-Assad, former head of Syria’s elite internal security forces
A former pillar of the Damascus regime, Rifaat al-Assad was the head of the elite internal security forces, the Defense Brigades, which bloodily suppressed, in particular, an Islamist insurrection in 1982 in the city of Hama. This earned him the nickname “the butcher of Hama”.
In 1984, he left Syria after a failed coup against his brother, Hafez al-Assad, joining Switzerland and then France. In the fall of 2021, the octogenarian returned to Syria after more than three decades in exile, pro-government media reported.
Awarded the Legion of Honor in France in 1986 for “services rendered”, Rifaat al-Assad is threatened with a lawsuit in Spain for much broader suspicions of “ill-gotten gains” on some 500 properties. He is also on trial in Switzerland for war crimes committed in the 1980s.
The second case of ill-gotten gains
This is the second case of “ill-gotten gains” tried in France, after that of Teodorin Obiang, eldest son of the president of Equatorial Guinea, definitively sentenced in July 2021 to three years in prison and a 30 million euro fine. .
Other investigations are ongoing, targeting in particular the family of former Yemeni President Ali Abdallah Saleh or that of former Gabonese leader Omar Bongo Ondimba, nine of whose children were indicted in the spring and July.
Source: BFM TV
