Suspicions of corruption: Monegasque justice buries the Dmitri Rybolovlev affair

The Rybolovlev affair is over. This Thursday, February 27, the Monaco Council Chamber (the equivalent of our court of appeal) purely and simply canceled the entire legal proceedings which were worth to the president of AS Monaco and to many Monegasque dignitaries to be under the threat of a trial for corruption and trafficking in influence.

High magistrates have drawn the consequences of a recent judgment of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) which considered that the centerpiece of the accusation had been collected in an illegal way. “So there is no longer any other criminal procedure open against Dmitri Rybolovlev and Tetiana Bersheda (his lawyer). They are totally and definitely bleached, ”rejoice their lawyers my Martin Reynaud, Thomas Giaccardi, Jacqueline Laffont, Sébastien Schapira and Léa Hufnagel.

His lawyer’s phone behind the case

This whole case with drawers is part of the dispute between Dmitri Rybolovlev and the Swiss art dealer Yves Bouvier. For several years, the two men did business together, the second allowing the first to build up an exceptional private collection of master tables (Leonard de Vinci, Van Gogh, Picasso, etc.). But, in 2015, the oligarch discovers that his partner made colossal margins on each transaction and files a complaint in Monaco. Even if the two men have now buried the ax of war by signing a memorandum of understanding in November 2023, their dispute fueled justice.

In November 2018, nine personalities were charged (the Monegasque equivalent of the indictment): in addition to the Russian oligarch, we find the ex-director of judicial services (the Minister of Justice) Philippe Narmino, the former Attorney General Jean-Pierre Dreno, as well as several high-ranking police officers, including the former director of the judicial police, Philippe Haget. The scandal shakes the rock.

But from the start, the lawyers for Dmitri Rybolovlev and Tetiana Bersheda consider that the investigating judge was not allowed to use the conversations between a lawyer and his client, but also that he had gone far beyond his referral by exploiting all of the content of the telephone. After losing all their appeals, they finally won the case before the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). In a judgment of June 6, 2024, the magistrates concluded that these elements had been obtained in violation of article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights on respect for privacy.

All of the procedure falls

The whole question was therefore to know what the Monegasque investigating judge seized of the investigation for corruption and influence trafficking was going to make this turnaround. The ECDH’s judgment had already been emulated in France, since the investigation chamber of the Paris Court of Appeal recently invoked it to cancel documents in another procedure. It was also invoked in a parallel procedure in Switzerland.

In fact, it was the investigating judge himself who seized the council chamber so that it rules on the validity of the documents of its investigation, and in particular on the first of them: the operating report of the Tetiana Bersheda phone. The lawyers of the accused joined this approach aimed at drawing the consequences of the cessation of the ECHR.

At the end of the debates, the case had been deliberated. The council chamber spoke this Thursday. She therefore decided to cancel this operating report and all the subsequent acts that result from it. That is to say, by an effect of domino, to bring down the entire procedure, which had nevertheless reached its end after years of investigation. All the charges of the many accused are now zero. There is no longer any Rybolovlev.