Misappropriation of public funds: two years suspended for the former director of a mixed economy company in Marseille

The former general manager of a mixed economy company linked to the city of Marseille was sentenced, Monday March 18, for embezzlement of public funds to two years in prison and a fine of 20.000 euros in a case including the facts date back twenty years.

At the head of SEM Marseille Aménagement from 1998 to 2013, Charles Boumendil, 76, was found guilty of having accepted the overvaluation of the eviction compensation for land on which the municipality of Jean-Claude Gaudin wanted build the Palais Omnisports de Marseille Grand Est (Pomme) housing an ice rink.

The 13.000 square meter plot was granted until 2008 to the company Laser Propreté managed by Philippe Lasery, who was opposed to an early departure.

The debates held in January before the court established that the mayor's office had worked hard, in 2004, to have the ice rink open before 2008 so that the equipment would appear in the balance sheet of Jean-Claude Gaudin who wanted to request a third term.

It is in this context of political emergency that, on August 4, 2004, Charles Boumendil and Laser Propreté signed a transactional protocol which retained an eviction compensation of 2.068.061 euros whereas two months earlier, the Domaines including Marseille Aménagement had requested the opinion, had set it at 153.200 euros.

The amount of two million euros was determined at the end of an expertise which the court considered “questionable and lacking in rigor”. Tried in his absence for complicity in embezzlement of public funds, the expert was acquitted for the benefit of the doubt, the proof of his bad faith having not been accepted. On the other hand, the court sentenced Philippe Lasery to 18 months in prison and a fine of 20.000 euros for concealment of embezzlement of public funds.

The court had an assessment diametrically opposed to that of the Marseille prosecutor's office which, in January during the debates, just as it had done at the end of the investigation in October 2021, had concluded that "charges were insufficient to characterize the offense of embezzlement of public funds.

By sending the defendants back to court, the investigating judge did not follow these requisitions, considering that "Charles Boumendil, while he had a clear and unambiguous evaluation of the Estates, ended up hiring Marseille Aménagement to pay, in a transactional framework, a sum almost twelve times greater than that indicated to him by the State services".