The singer Enrico Macias obtained Tuesday, December 7 a “victory in principle” before the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) against the Luxembourg justice, which ordered him in 2019 to reimburse 30 million euros to the liquidator of ‘a bank, according to his lawyer. He is in litigation against Landsbanki, which went bankrupt in 2008.
“It is a victory of principle and esteem for Enrico Macias. Even if the path is narrow, Enrico Macias now has no choice but to use this European conviction (of Luxembourg) to seek to obtain a review of his own conviction by the Luxembourg courts. Unfortunately, his legal ordeal is not over“, said his lawyer Patrice Spinosi in a statement to AFP.
In its judgment, the ECHR considers that the Luxembourg Court of Cassation, by rejecting the appeal brought by the singer, violated provisions of the European Convention on Human Rights on the “right to a fair trial”. The European judges also ordered Luxembourg to pay him 12,000 euros for “non-pecuniary damage”, far from the 15 million euros he was claiming for the material damage he felt he had suffered. “The decision on this essential point is eminently disappointing “and the compensation” totally derisory in view of the damage.“, estimated Mr. Spinosi.
As a reminder, Enrico Macias – also in dispute in another case, for the financing of an aesthetic clinic – in 2007 obtained from this bank a loan of approximately 30 million euros which had allowed him “to invest in Madoff funds”, named after Bernard Madoff, sentenced in 2009 to 150 years in prison in the United States for the biggest swindle in history.
After the bankruptcy of the bank at the end of 2008, its liquidators had undertaken to collect the debts, even if it meant putting the mortgaged property up for sale. The singer had himself hired his villa in Saint-Tropez, a place of memories with his late wife Suzy, for 35 million euros from the bank, thus seeing himself threatened with losing this property. Like many of the establishment’s other clients, he had tried to get his loan canceled. Corn in March 2019, the Luxembourg courts had definitively ordered him to reimburse the 30 million euros to the bank’s liquidator.