It is a penalty which costs the community much less than prison, and which even pays off for the State: confiscation. The principle is quite simple: “Crime should not pay” and “no one should profit from his crime”. These are the currencies of the Agency for the Management and Recovery of Seized and Confiscated Assets (Agrasc), created almost 12 years ago and which has made it possible to really develop this procedure for the confiscation of property and assets. A procedure which was until then in France very complicated to set up, and which the magistrates therefore abandoned, fearing the administrative burden.
Drug traffickers, pimps, crooks, for example, generate profits. It can also be elected officials who embezzle public money. Against them, the judge can pronounce – in addition to or instead of prison – a penalty of confiscation. The State takes back from them the sums, the goods acquired illegally. For the biggest offences, the entire estate can even be confiscated. “Prison has a costexplains Nicolas Bessonne, director of Agrasc, it sometimes does not allow any reintegration, given the conditions of execution of the sentences and the situation of the prisons. So, next to prison, the penalty of confiscation is the most effective. It is a sentence that hits hard and impoverishes the offender, a sentence that hurts him.”
“We invite our fellow magistrates to go harder, to pronounce this sentence more. It is a particularly useful sentence which deserves to be further developed.”
Nicolas Bessonne, director of Agrascat franceinfo
With his colleagues, they regularly travel to the regions in the courts to make all the magistrates better aware of this procedure, this possibility of tapping into the wallet. These confiscations relate to the State : for 2022, 200 million euros will land directly in the coffers of Bercy in this way. In 2021, it was 150 million euros. In 2020, 85 million euros. Agrasc does not know the crisis.
/2022/11/09/phpxR10nY.jpg)
What exactly is the state confiscating from thugs? Mainly money. This ranges from 500 euros in cash seized at a deal point to large sums drawn from the bank accounts of offenders. A few months ago, the agency seized life insurance in the amount of 89 million euros. But there are also movable assets such as luxury or non-luxury cars, luxury watches highly prized in organized crime circles, valuable clothing, telephones… More exotic, a few months ago in the Jura, a herd of cows or in Burgundy bottles of great vintages. Movable property often goes up for auction. In October 2022, two prestigious sales in Lyon and Marseille brought back nearly 1.5 million euros to the State’s coffers thanks to boats, cars, perfumes, belts, diamonds…
Finally, there are confiscations of real estate. It ranges from the shabby studio of the small cannabis trafficker to the opulent villa of the corrupt elected official. Confiscations that hurt offenders, as Grégory Zaoui, one of the pioneers of carbon tax fraud, convicted of fraud, agreed to tell us. “It was a terrible time in my life.recalls the former scammer. I was seized 20 000 euros in banknotes at home, my bank accounts in France and abroad, an apartment in Israel. They took me everywhere. And it was a painful game of cat and mouse because I admit I was trying to hide cars or goods right and left.”
“You have to admit that when you have tried to make money even if it was illicitly, when they take them from you it is very annoying. I must admit that it is a very effective sentence.”
Gregory Zaouiat franceinfo
The big thugs, in their “benefit-risk” calculation when they embark on a delinquent career, include the possibility of having to go to prison. More rarely, they include the possibility of ending up ruined. So when the sentence of confiscation or even confiscation of the entire heritage is pronounced, it is not uncommon to see the defendants blanch with surprise in the box. It is no longer rare to see convicts appealing these confiscation sentences without appealing the prison sentence. This clearly demonstrates what ultimately saddens them the most.
/2022/11/09/phpiW6WUx.jpg)
The state, for its part, increasingly seeks to create a virtuous circle by reallocating confiscated property. These goods can be directly attributed to the services of the State: to the police, to the gendarmerie and even to justice for a few months. Recently, flat screens seized from a fraudulent entrepreneur were assigned to the Aix-en-Provence Court of Appeal, which needed them for remote witness hearings during trials.
Since a law of April 2021, it is also possible to consider a social assignment of confiscated real estate. This has been done in Italy for a long time with property confiscated from the mafia. That is to say that the confiscated apartments, houses, villas can be made available to associations which have a mission of public interest. “You can imagine everythingsays Arnaud de Laguiche, head of the real estate department at Agrasc. We have all kinds of goods in our portfolio. It is, for example, an apartment that was used by a pimp or a slum broker that we will then use to shelter former victims of this type of offender. We can also think of a property that belonged to a drug trafficker and which can be used for the rehabilitation of drug addicts.
“Ideally, we want there to be a link between the original act of crime and the project that we will then select. But, we can also imagine making apartments or houses available to victims of domestic violence or others.”
Arnaud de Laguiche, Head of the Real Estate Department at Agrascat franceinfo
The first four humanitarian associations are thus on the point of recovering the enjoyment of buildings or houses recently confiscated from delinquents. The boss of Agrasc, Nicolas Bessonne, is satisfied with it. For him, if confiscations pay off financially, they are also important in terms of display and symbol: “The population strongly adheres to this system because whoever gets up in the morning to earn 1 500 euros per month and who in the same neighborhood as him sees the drug trafficker who struts around with a big Mercedes and a Rolex on his wrist is legitimately shocked. Confiscation with subsequent reassignment is a way, ultimately, to demonstrate the effectiveness of the state. When you take a trafficker’s powerful car and assign it to a research and intervention squad of the judicial police, for example, that makes sense. This gives, at zero cost to the community, the means to fight effectively against the phenomenon. argues the former prosecutor.
Ruining a trafficker is finally, according to him, a way to ensure that he does not continue his activities from prison with a clandestine mobile phone. If he no longer has the money to give outside orders, he will possibly be forced to stop. We guess, however, that organized crime networks have the resources to adapt and bounce back despite the large sums and assets that are increasingly confiscated.