The enfant terrible of the La Rochelle bar may not have finished making headlines. On May 28, police officers from the Bordeaux PJ, who specialize in fighting financial crime, went to Patrice Brossy’s home as part of a search. The former lawyer was taken into custody immediately afterwards.
Art objects in a box
The investigation carried out by the Bordeaux public prosecutor’s office concerns suspicions of embezzlement in the context of two cases that the lawyer had to handle. The first concerns the judicial liquidation of a catering company in La Rochelle for which the legal representative had sent him a bonus of 470,000 euros, with the responsibility for him to return it to the partner of the company. In reality, the funds were paid to a company created in Bordeaux with a relative of the lawyer and bearing the same name as the liquidated company. Investigators suspect that this scheme was used to divert the money that had been given to him via Carpa (Autonomous Fund for the Financial Settlement of Lawyers) which filed a complaint.
The lawyer is also suspected of having defrauded one of his clients, a SCI to which he had made 120,000 euros during a trial, but to whom he would never have paid the sum won. During the search, the police discovered luxury watches, works of art such as paintings or sculptures, probably purchased with these funds and stored in a box.
A 40-centimeter machete
When contacted, Patrice Brossy’s lawyer did not wish to comment. For his part, the person concerned limited himself to telling “Sud Ouest” that his psychiatric condition had deteriorated significantly at the time of the events he is accused of.
In 2022, Me Patrice Brossy, a prominent lawyer in La Rochelle, had already hit the headlines and had been sentenced to three years in prison, 18 months of which were suspended with probation, by the Poitiers Court of Appeal for “violence with a weapon, threat of crime and carrying weapons”. Faced with the owner of his accommodation who had just announced to him that she was putting the apartment he occupied up for sale, he had brandished a sledgehammer and a 40-centimetre machete that he had just taken out of a car.
A few days later, he went to a Mercedes dealership which he accused of having sold him a defective car, flanked by two newly hired security guards and gassed the sales manager. Then, he went to the General Assembly of the Bar Association with which he was in conflict and sowed panic. A checkout attendant at a gas station where her bank card did not pass will then pay the price for the escapades of the lawyer who brandishes a fake revolver in front of her. At his trial, the man claimed he was suffering from bipolar disorder.
However, he was incarcerated for several months in the Vivonne penitentiary center. Having been struck off the Order, he swears that he is now “stabilized.”
