The Minister of Justice Gérald Darmanin, visiting Marseille, said Thursday that he wanted to “hit the wallet” of drug traffickers who now have enough means to “corrupt” agents or threaten them, ensuring that he wanted to put “the means against money laundering 'money”.
“We have to hit our wallets,” the minister told journalists, following interviews at the Marseille judicial court, stressing that “prison sentences are not completely dissuasive for the biggest offenders (…) , sometimes sentenced to decades in prison without stopping their trafficking.”
The minister spoke in particular of “the confiscation of ill-gotten assets, money, cars, real estate”, in France and abroad. He thus announced that he would go “around January 20” to the United Arab Emirates, where certain identified drug traffickers thrive, in order to “improve judicial cooperation”.
“Let us increase the sentences of those who corrupt and/or threaten state agents”
“This issue of money laundering must be the most important, because we can harm traffickers even before their conviction,” he insisted, recalling that “a law exists which allows seizures before a judgment.”
“When organized crime has enough resources to have parallel telephone networks, to have financing circuits abroad, to be able to put money into (…) real estate, catering, (.. .) and to be able to corrupt agents or threaten them, (…) we are in a tipping point for the Republic and we must collectively wake up.” The minister said he would like “to increase the sentences of those who corrupt and/or threaten these state agents.”
He said he intended to give “instructions in the criminal policy circular to prosecutors so that attacks, threats and corruption against public officials are prosecuted with the greatest firmness” and “particularly condemned”.
“Show apartment”
Returning to his controversial proposal to strengthen the isolation in detention of “the 100 biggest drug traffickers”, Mr. Darmanin explained that he wanted to create “a sort of +starter+” program, a “show apartment”, as in real estate. “I note that when these narcobandits are placed in solitary confinement, a certain number of targeted assassinations stopped,” he said, explaining that he had asked the prison administration to “provide him with the 100 profiles requested” , so that then “we can show this model apartment, which I hope we will generalize to all those who continue their prison traffic”.
On Wednesday afternoon, the Minister of Justice was to visit a closed educational center before going to the Marseille Baumettes remand center, whose director and head of detention had to be temporarily relieved and placed under protection at the beginning of December after being threatened by a drug trafficker.
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