The Court of Cassation rejected, Wednesday, September 7, the appeal of Rifaat Al-Assad, uncle of Syrian leader Bashar Al-Assad, making final his sentence to four years in prison in France for “ill-gotten gains”. The court also confirmed the confiscation of his assets, valued at 90 million euros. The value of these assets should be returned to Syria under the new mechanism for the return of assets fraudulently acquired by foreign leaders, adopted by Parliament in 2021.
Rifat Al-Assad, too former vice-president of Syria, now 85, was sentenced on appeal in Paris on September 9, 2021, to the same sentence as at first instance, for Organized laundering of Syrian public funds and laundering of aggravated tax evasion between 1996 and 2016. Rifaat Al-Assad had also been sentenced for the concealed work of domestic workers.
In this investigation initiated in 2014 after complaints from the NGOs Sherpa and Transparency International, two mansions, dozens of apartments in the wealthy districts of the capital, an estate with a castle and stud farm, offices and a property in London were notably seized.
A former pillar of the Damascus regime, Rifaat Al-Assad was the head of the elite internal security forces, the Defense Brigades, which notably suppressed in blood an Islamist insurrection in 1982 in the city of Hama. It earned him a 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 of exile, announced a pro-government media. Decorated with the Legion of Honor in France in 1986 for “services rendered”, Rifaat Al-Assad is threatened with a trial in Spain for much broader suspicions of “ill-gotten gains” concerning some 500 properties. He is also being prosecuted in Switzerland for war crimes committed in the 1980s.