Actress Isabelle Adjani finally tried on Friday for tax fraud

The appeal trial in Paris in a tax fraud case against Isabelle Adjani, initially scheduled for this Thursday, has been postponed for one day, AFP learned from a judicial source. The reason for this postponement was not specified. French actress Isabelle Adjani was to be retried this Thursday before the Paris Court of Appeal in a tax fraud case for which she was sentenced at first instance to two years in prison as well as a fine of 250,000 euros.

The court had estimated, in December 2023, that the facts demonstrated its “desire to conceal from the tax administration” and that they wore “seriously undermines the equality of citizens before taxes”.

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The 70-year-old five-César artist, known in particular for her roles in “The murderous summer” (1983), “Camille Claudel” (1988), “Queen Margot” (1994) or recently “Masquerade” (2022), was revealed to the general public in 1974 in “The Slap” by Claude Pinoteau when she was not twenty years old.

Fraud, money laundering and “disguised donation”

Isabelle Adjani, absent from her first trial, was found guilty of having fraudulently domiciled in Portugal in 2016 and 2017, thus evading 236,000 euros in income tax. She was also convicted for a sum of two million euros paid in 2013 by Mamadou Diagna NDiaye, a businessman and friend of the actress, president of the Senegalese National Olympic and Sports Committee and also a member of the International Olympic Committee. For the court, this sum, declared as a loan, was a “disguised donation”which allowed the defendant, then in financial difficulty, to evade 1.2 million euros in transfer taxes.

Finally, Isabelle Adjani was found guilty of money laundering for having transferred via an account “undeclared” in the United States 119,000 euros to Portugal – the court having estimated that “the material and legal conditions of this operation could have no other justification than to conceal the origin and destination of these funds”. Contacted on Wednesday, the actress’s lawyers did not respond.

The investigation was opened in 2016 after the name of Isabelle Adjani appeared in the Panama Papers, as the owner of a company in the British Virgin Islands. The investigations did not lead to any prosecution on this aspect but they did uncover other suspicions.