On May 24, before the Ajaccio criminal court, François Raffalli, 37 years old, manager of the eponymous company, and his auditor, Fabrice Rabattu, 66 years old, contested having falsified the balance sheets, to undervalue losses of the public works company, purchased by Patrick Rocca on December 28, 2017. The latter was a civil party at this hearing.
This Friday, June 28, the court dismissed this important local business leader and considered that there had been no fraudulent maneuvers which would have led to a scam.
If the auditor was completely acquitted in this case, François Raffalli received a suspended prison sentence of 5 months and a fine of 5,000 euros for a related offense, namely fraud against an organization responsible for of a public service mission.
While the insincerity of the accounts was not formally contested, the issue at stake in the trial was whether a deliberate manoeuvre had been put in place to deceive the buyer, or, more prosaically, whether the faults raised were the result of a lack of competence.
“There was never any fraud”
According to Me Julien Gasbaoui, counsel to François Raffalli: “The court only drew the conclusions from the analysis of a file which, although very oriented, did not succeed in masking the evidence which consists of saying that Mr. Raffalli communicated all the information relating to the company sold, and that there has never been any fraud to the detriment of Mr. Rocca”.
The amount of 3 million euros, set for this sale, has still not been paid, particularly with regard to this procedure. To this, Patrick Rocca’s lawyers, Jean Luisi and Philippe Gatti, responded: “Patrick Rocca will pay what he has to pay, whether it’s 3 million or less. You can accuse him of everything, but he never drove a nail.”
