Nina Ricci heir gets jail sentence for tax evasion in France

The heir to the Nina Ricci perfume dynasty has been sentenced to three years in prison, two of them suspended, after being convicted on Monday of hiding money from the French taxman with the help of HSBC.

A Paris court also fined Arlette Ricci €1m after declaring she had shown a "particularly determined willingness for more than 20 years" to hide money left to her by her father in Swiss bank accounts.

“The seriousness of the facts are an exceptional threat to public order and the republican pact,” read the judgment, seen as an important precedent for as many as 50 other cases of alleged tax fraud involving HSBC in France.

Judges also ordered the seizure of a house in Paris and a property in Corsica with a total estimated value of €4m, that it said had been transferred to family trusts in an alleged attempt by Ricci to “organise her own insolvability” and escape financial penalties.

Ricci (74) is the first of around 50 wealthy French nationals being pursued in the courts for allegedly placing money in Switzerland to avoid taxes.

During the high-profile trial, she was accused of hiding €18m from the French taxman. She had fiercely denied the accusations, insisting the measures taken to optimise her tax bill were legal.

The judgment comes just five days after HSBC Holdings was officially mis en examen, the French equivalent of being charged, for complicity in hiding fiscal fraud and illegal selling via its Swiss arm between 2006 and 2007. The bank was ordered to pay a €1bn surety. The Geneva-based branch of the bank is accused of having hidden around €5bn for nearly 9,000 wealthy French customers.

Ricci’s tax adviser Henri-Nicolas Fleurance was given a one-year suspended prison sentence and a €10,000 fine for attempting to organise her insolvency, and Ricci’s daughter an eight-month suspended sentence for fiscal fraud.

The heiress’s lawyers said they would consider the judgment before deciding whether to appeal.

The Swiss branch of HSBC, Britain’s biggest bank, was officially put under investigation last November on allegations that it helped rich clients conceal money in offshore accounts.

Ricci's name was among around 3,000 suspected tax fraudsters holding non-declared bank accounts in Switzerland. The names featured in bank files passed to the French authorities in 2008 by HSBC employee Herve Falciani.

Most of the cases were settled, but Ricci’s was among 50 that were handed over to the courts. She was arrested in 2011 after police turned up at her apartment on Paris’s chic Boulevard Saint-Germain in a dawn raid.

Ricci was held in custody for 48 hours before being put under investigation. Her lawyers had attempted to have the case thrown out, arguing that the Falciani documents were stolen and should not be admitted as evidence.

As well as French investigations, the Swiss branch of HSBC is facing charges of fraud and money laundering in Belgium after the Brussels authorities claimed it had “knowingly eased and promoted fiscal fraud by making offshore companies available to certain privileged clients”.

Nina Ricci was an Italian-born clothes designer who settled in France aged 12 in 1895. She died in 1970. Her son Robert, Arlette Ricci’s father, developed the company’s perfume sideline and raised the firm’s international profile. Arlette Ricci inherited his fortune on his death in 1988. – (Guardian service)