– The grandmother of the “Zairean connection” is sentenced
The fifty-year-old who helped launder nearly half a million francs received thirty months in prison, six of which were suspended.
Posted today at 6:59 a.m.
The Broye and Northern Vaudois Court sentences a mother and grandmother of a large family to six months of deprivation of liberty.
JEAN-PAUL GUINNARD
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The Northern Vaud Criminal Court did not believe in the naive posture of a fifty-year-old referred to him on May 30: he has just convicted this mother and grandmother of a large family for fraud and qualified money laundering. She receives a total sentence of thirty months of deprivation of liberty, including a fixed portion of six months.
We do not yet know the motivations of the judges, but they followed, although slightly downwards, the requisitions of the Public Prosecutor’s Office which had proposed thirty-six months, of which six were closed. We can therefore assume that their thinking followed the same path. Prosecutor Gabriel Moret had considered the defendant to be a knowledgeable actress in this criminal network probably based in Africa.
By agreeing to transfer money to her bank account, this independent trader must have suspected that she was associating with criminals. Especially since the amounts were impressive: in a few weeks, at the start of 2021, nearly half a million francs had been credited to him.
A good part had been given to an acquaintance, the balance remaining in his hands as commission. Money that is far too easy not to consider its criminal origin, in this case funds siphoned off from private accounts, after hacking of bank access.
“I did not know”
Not very talkative during her trial, this woman with meager resources who is still raising her two youngest children claimed not to have understood that these “business contracts” made her the accomplice of a fraud. “I didn’t know such things existed,” she said. At home in Africa, we trust a lot. Here, people are more suspicious.”
Who trusted who in this network? Difficult to know. But his daughter and son-in-law had also been implicated and sentenced to suspended sentences at the start of the year. From one trial to another, it was not possible to clarify who had dragged their relatives into the juicy affair, but the prosecutor estimated that the two generations had been more than simple executioners. He had considered that mother and daughter had held a certain rank in the organization, since they seemed active in the exchanges linked to the transactions and had also taken care of recruiting other “mules”.
In the event of conviction, the Prosecutor’s Office still requested payment of 80,000 francs. of compensatory debt to the State, arguing that “crime must never pay”. This was the supposed amount of commissions received from the illegal jackpot. The Court reduced this sum to 65,000 francs.
The decision can still be appealed.
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Flavienne Wahli Di Matteo is a legal columnist in the Vaud and regions section of 24 hours, which she joined in 2012. Before that, she worked in the local sections of several media in the written press, radio and television. More informations
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