Marco Mouly, one of the main characters in the giant VAT scam on the carbon market, is no longer on the run. He went to the Paris judicial court on Wednesday March 13 with a view to his incarceration, after the partial revocation of his suspended sentence ordered on Friday.
“I’m not going on the run, I’m surrendering, the run no longer exists,” he told the press in the court hall. “The stomach is there, it’s scary to go to prison,” he confided, carrying two large travel bags. “It’s a little hard for me to go to prison” when “the procedure is thirty years old,” he added.
In a decision rendered on Friday, a sentence enforcement judge ordered the partial revocation for eighteen months of a three-year prison sentence, handed down in April 2019 by the Paris Court of Appeal, for fraud carried out by an organized gang during 1998 and 1999. The magistrate considered that several obligations imposed on Mr. Mouly had not been respected.
Concerning the obligation to work, the person concerned held “a fictitious job” as a community manager, according to the judge, and “he provided the justice system with false pay slips, against the backdrop of a well-oiled organization”. At the same time, he declared during an audition that he was working on a second book and had landed a leading role in a film which should be shot soon.
His escape denied
Marco Mouly, known as “Marco the Elegant”, did not pay the fine in full either, the judge having noted a balance of 11,569 euros to be paid on a fine of 15,000 euros. He also owes very large sums in connection with his other convictions, all cases combined, it is noted in the decision. The three-year prison sentence was suspended for a period of three years. The probation expiration date was set for January 20, 2024.
The Mediapart site, which contacted him, announced on Friday that he was fleeing, while specifying that it was not able to verify whether this was indeed the case. In the evening, Marco Mouly declared on the C8 channel that this was “false”.
In front of the press on Wednesday, Marco Mouly overwhelmed Mediapart journalist Fabrice Arfi, author of this article and the book D'argent et de sang (Seuil, 2018), which was adapted into a successful series on Canal. “The problem is that the film hurt me very, very badly,” said Marco Mouly. “Once again, it’s based on real facts” but the series remains “a fiction,” he said.
