Monday, March 6, was supposed to be a great day for Adrien Labi. The British businessman was in Paris to finalize a major real estate deal with Kering. The French luxury giant headed by François-Henri Pinault had agreed to pay the astronomical sum of one billion euros to buy two buildings located on Avenue Montaigne in Paris' 8th arrondissement, where property prices are among the highest in the capital. A lucrative deal for Labi, who more than doubled his initial wager when he bought the buildings eight years ago.
Yet euphoria soon gave way to stupor after the sale was signed. Upon leaving the notary's office, he was arrested by agents of the Brigade Nationale de Répression de la Délinquance Fiscale (National Fiscal Offenses Repression Brigade, BNRDF) and placed in police custody. This improbable development marked the end of 20 years of real estate adventures during which Labi's name could be heard as often in the affluent Parisian districts as in the courts.
The spotlight first fell on the man nicknamed the "Ghost" of Paris' prestigious neighborhood in the 8th arrondissement, known as the "Golden Triangle," in 2015. An investigation by Le Monde's magazine M brought to light the vast prestigious real estate portfolio in this posh area of Paris' hyper-center, worth hundreds of millions of euros, held by this businessman unknown to the public at large. Yet Labi was already a very familiar figure to the French tax authorities, who started taking an interest in his dealings in the mid-2000s. Riddled with tax audits, his companies were forced to pay millions of euros in tax adjustments, but the "ghost" refused and exploited every possible legal recourse to avoid doing so.
His daughter sentenced to two years in prison
Slowly, however, the noose tightened as tax authorities referred the most serious cases to the courts. The first judicial investigation was dismissed in 2010. Two years later, the Paris Criminal Court sentenced a company that was part of Labi's empire for tax fraud for the first time. Tempolux was found guilty of having moved four Parisian properties between several companies in Luxembourg and France "exclusively for tax purposes" to dodge four million euros in capital gains taxes. Labi, who was not officially linked to any of these companies, managed to slip away. His daughter Clarissa, on the other hand, was sentenced to two years in prison as manager of Tempolux. The court noted that it "appears highly probable" that she "was not the sole perpetrator."
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