The trial of Roland Bernard, 73, the “Madoff Berrichon” accused of having defrauded more than 100 relatives, in Berry and Vienne, between 2000 and 2013, for a total loot of nearly 6 million euros, began this Monday at the criminal court of Châteauroux (Indre). It should last 10 days. The first day of the hearing was devoted to the personality of the accused, who immediately admitted having lied to investigators for eight years.
Roland Bernard explained that he had been kidnapped and extorted in 1980 and had to bring money to his captors every month in Paris. This is where he came up with the idea of offering fake life insurance to relatives, acquaintances, friends of his farming family. From the beginning of the hearing he confessed to having invented his sequestration because he was ashamed.
I didn’t think there were so many of us!”
Colette, one of Roland Bernard’s victims
This shame is the only clear element that emerges from his story. Roland Bernard no longer knows when he started his financial arrangements, perhaps at the end of the 1990s, or at the beginning of the 1980s. He no longer knows whether the sums are counted in francs or in euros. Some victims find it “aged”, “emaciated”. He’s not very tall, balding, and he keeps his head down in the collar of his oversized suit. When the prosecutor tells him that his wife calls him a man “honest”he answers : “I’m dishonest, I’m a scoundrel!”
In the room the victims whisper, comment, sometimes giggle. “I didn’t think there were so many of us”, loose Colette, observing the almost full room. She lost 150,000 euros by trusting Roland Bernard, “a friend’s cousin”.
Michelle and her ex-husband told him money from the sale of a farm, intended to supplement their retirement as farmers. Around 300,000 euros. “He first offered us 6% interest rate, then 7% or even 7 and a half! Today I only have my pension of 800 euros”she laments before confiding: “Seeing him again almost makes me want to hurt him, even though I never will”.
Where is the money today?
Colette and Michelle know that they will not see their money again, Roland Bernard assures that he has nothing left, that he has “surely been mismanaged in spending beyond what we could”. However, a month and a half before the collapse of this “ponzi scheme”he swallowed an unusual number of kilometers by car, points out the public prosecutor before asking: “You haven’t invested money abroad, in Switzerland, in a tax haven?” The defendant has no recollection of it. “The investigations showed that he did not go abroad”, adds his lawyer, Maître Eugène Bangoura. According to him, the missing money was used to reimburse other customers. “My client managed a portfolio of 400 to 450 people, but only 150 files, those of people who filed a complaint, were examined. The money was not used to enrich him”.
Today Roland Bernard lives with his wife – also on trial for complicity, accused of having accompanied him by car to his “clients”, and for concealment – in a 70 m² apartment near their eldest daughter, in Brittany. They no longer see their 48-year-old son who lives in Haute-Garonne – also tried for concealment – since this “Ponzi pyramid” collapsed in 2013. The year Roland Bernard tried to put an end to his days and revealed his scam in his suicide note.