It all started when the ready-to-wear company sought to recover, last July, an investment made a year earlier. 100 million euros had been placed by a company treasurer in a bank account. The idea is to recover this amount with interest. But when Kiabi wants to get his hands on this great jackpot, nothing is left. The account is empty. The French brand then told AFP that it had been the victim of a “large-scale sophisticated financial fraud”based on the technique of rebound accounts.
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A former treasurer indicted
This method of bounce accounts is commonly used in financial systems to disguise the origin or final destination of funds, often for fraudulent or illegal purposes, such as money laundering. Concretely, it involves transferring money through several bank or intermediary accounts, before it reaches its final beneficiary, thus making it difficult to trace the funds.
Suspicions therefore quickly fell on the treasurer in charge of investing this money. The latter no longer works for Kiabi, but has moved to Miami and is active in the luxury sector. She was arrested on Monday, August 12, while landing in Figari (Southern Corsica) with her private jet. THE Parisian adds that investigators discovered more than 500,000 euros worth of jewelry and luxury items on the plane. “This fraud in no way calls into question the financial solidity of Kiabi and has no impact on the maintenance of our annual trajectory.”however, assures the company, which has also planned the opening of 8 new points of sale in Belgium this year.
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“We immediately launched all necessary actions, including legal ones, in order to obtain recovery of the amount of the fraud. We have every confidence in the outcome of the actions carried out by the judicial and police authorities involved,” Kiabi management said on Friday. Suspected of having embezzled these 100 million euros, the former treasurer of the ready-to-wear company was indicted and placed in pre-trial detention for “fraud and money laundering in an organized gang”the investigators did not imagine that she could have acted alone. A few weeks before transferring the 100 million euros, she was sentenced by the Paris criminal court to two years in prison for a fraud against another company, this time of nearly 800,000 euros.
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