French businessman acquitted in Hong Kong after years in prison

A former trader, he converted to building luxury homes in Bali, Indonesia. Following a trade dispute, his associates, including a Hong Kong man, initiated civil and criminal proceedings against him in Hong Kong in 2012 and 2013.

The Frenchman, originally from Rodez in Aveyron, was sentenced in March 2015 - in his absence - by a court in the former British colony to pay compensation of nearly three million euros to his former associates.

He was then arrested and imprisoned in July 2017 in Bali, before being extradited in September 2019 to Hong Kong.

Very weakened after a hunger strike, he was released on bail in November 2020, a few days before the start of his trial for money laundering.

His acquittal on Wednesday is "a magnificent victory against injustice and slander," one of his lawyers, Clémence Witt, told AFP.

"The innocence of Mathias Echène is finally recognized, at the end of a procedure marred by serious irregularities, which were sanctioned both by the United Nations and by the French courts", she adds.

"In August 2019, the UN condemned the arbitrary nature of his detention and demanded his immediate release," recalls his other lawyer, Victor Champey.

"And on March 17, 2021, the French Court of Cassation definitively rejected the appeals against the judgments of the Paris Court of Appeal which prohibited the execution of the decisions of the Hong Kong justice on French territory," he said. -He specifies.

On the side of his family, it is "the explosion of happiness". "The wait over the past few days has been awful. We are overjoyed," exclaims Eléonore Echène, her sister.

Reached by phone by AFP, Mathias Echène, 51, says he is "in heaven", but remains very affected by the "terrible damage" that this affair has had on his family.

"My top priority is to find my three children, to give them a hug, and to rebuild a stable family nucleus so that they can rebuild themselves after all these horrors and slanders around which they have gravitated for the past nine years", confides he does.

The entrepreneur hopes "to return to France as quickly as possible, within a week perhaps", once he has in his possession the necessary travel documents, because his passport has expired.