INFO FRANCEINFO. Suspected of having embezzled 100 million euros, a former treasurer of Kiabi indicted and imprisoned

This 39-year-old woman was arrested in August by the judicial police. She was wanted after 100 million euros vanished from the clothing brand’s coffers.

On Monday August 12, 2024, under oppressive heat, a private jet landed on the runway at Figari airport (South Corsica). On board, a 39-year-old woman arriving from Italy has no idea that a rather special welcome committee awaits her. The judicial police have been on his trail for several weeks. Since Kiabi, the “low-cost” clothing brand filed a complaint, after realizing that 100 million euros had disappeared from its coffers.

Central office investigators for repression of major financial delinquency (OCRGDF) were quick to put a name and a face to the one who seems to be at the origin of a colossal embezzlement: the suspect is a former treasurer of the company who left the France to settle in Florida and work in the luxury sector.

According to a source close to the matter, it was in mid-July that Kiabi sought to recover an investment made a year earlier. In July 2023, the treasurer opened an account in a bank abroad – in Europe – to invest company funds. The transfer leaves: 100 million euros, all round. A sum that should have sat dormant for some time and earned interest. But when Kiabi approached the bank this summer to recover the investment, the money vanished, using the technique of “rebound accounts”. In the meantime, the former treasurer has settled in Miami. She works there for a group specializing in luxury. She is responsible for the “design” part. In a short profile in English on the internet, she is described as having started a “diversified” career within her own wealth management company. Among his achievements, the arrangement of the hangar of the private jet of a famous American DJ.

As soon as the discovery was made, Kiabi filed a complaint and the Paris prosecutor’s office opened an investigation. The first elements suggest that the former treasurer opened the bank account by usurping the identity of a senior official of the company.

But the former collaborator is not very careful. She puts herself on the scene on social networks, a boon for investigators who realize that she is in Europe. In the photo, we see her on the Greek island of Mykonos, during a lavish party organized to launch her interior design firm, then on the Amalfi Coast in Italy. Is it out of naivety or audacity, the suspect with Neapolitan and Corsican roots, according to the same portrait, even goes so far as to take a private jet to land in Corsica.

In his luggage, the police officers who arrested him discovered more than 500,000 euros of jewelry and luxury items. At the end of police custody, Kiabi’s ex-treasurer was brought back to Paris, where an investigating judge indicted her for “fraud and money laundering in an organized gang”. Because the investigators do not imagine that she could have acted alone. In an interview with Figaro Madamon August 16, the head of the central office for the fight against serious financial delinquency mentioned without further details the existence among her files of a “nebula suspected of having laundered 100 million euros.

At the end of her indictment, the suspect was placed in pre-trial detention, and justice is now working to understand the precise mechanisms of this extraordinary scam, “worthy of a Netflix series”, comments an expert on the matter, but also to find the money, which represents around 4% of Kiabi’s turnover (2.2 billion euros in 2023).

Contacted by franceinfo, the clothing brand explains having been “victim of a sophisticated financial fraud on a large scale”, discovery “during internal audits”. Kiabi specifies that it will do everything to “obtain recovery of the fraud”, while specifying that “does not in any way call into question [sa] financial solidity and has no impact on the maintenance of [sa] annual trajectory.

The company, which says its “confidence in the outcome of the actions carried out by the judicial and police authorities” was unaware that a few weeks before transferring the 100 million euros, its former treasurer had been sentenced by the Paris criminal court to two years’ suspended prison sentence for fraud against another company, this time involving nearly 800,000 euros.