2023-07-29 04:00:33
Surprisingly, there was no up-to-date list of people barred by the courts from running a business; this will now be the case. Objective: the fight once morest fraud. There is some bread on a wooden board.
It is a historical incongruity that has just been finally abolished. This summer, a central register of prohibition to manage a company. This did not exist, which means that great impunity reigned around people sentenced to professional bans.
The application of the law, approved by the House on May 4, 2023, is in its home stretch and was to be launched on August 1. Driven by a European directive, the text therefore required significant computer work to be implemented.
“This register is a blessing. We made a big cleaning effort, it was important for the courts to be able to take advantage of it, and without a centralized system, it was complicated.”
What will change? It will make available to everyone, in a few clicks, a national list of people prohibited from running a business, in order to know where you are stepping before doing business. The idea behind this register is indeed to hunt down professional fraudsters, who are often screens for laundering the money of very serious crime, and, by displaying them, “rotten their lives”, comments the president of the French-speaking business court of Brussels, Paul Dhaeyer.
The creation of this register is welcomed by most members of the judiciary. So, the lawyer Nicholas Ouchinsky believes that it “will make management ban penalties much more efficient. Until now, some financial criminals and bad managers might continue their misdeeds”.
Drug money laundering
For Paul Dhaeyer, this decision will change a lot of things. “It’s a blessing. We made a big cleaning effort, it was important that the courts might benefit from it, and without a centralized system, it was complicated“, he says. Brussels, which has the largest number of companies in the country, has in fact been weighed down for years by its large number of phantom companies, popular with criminal organizations that use them with men of straw to launder money from drug trafficking.In recent cases like the famous Sky ECC case – an enormous drug traffic brought to light thanks to the cracking of the code of cryptophones –, we thus find several straw men falsely leaders of real estate companies used to launder the money of the crime.
This register will allow limit this type of crime as much as possible linked to money laundering and to complicate their lives. When it is launched and effective, it might even revitalize economic sectors by offering more transparency”, commented, during a hearing, the deputy public prosecutor of Brussels Gilles Dejemeppe.
The ban on running a business was, until the end of the 2010s, a prerogative of the criminal courts. It has recently also been applicable by civil courts, mainly company courts. For prosecutors, this is a step forward, which allows them to avoid – often – cumbersome criminal proceedings to obtain more convincing results. Thus, the Brussels public prosecutor’s office has requested and obtained more than 200 professional bans in two yearsa figure unattainable by the criminal courts, if only for practical reasons, and because a criminal conviction involves proving the intentional element of a fraud.
“We go from one extreme to the other”
“The stigma of the professional ban will be very strong and very prejudicial. A fair measure would have been to limit this to bailiffs, notaries, judges…”
If the vision of the prosecution is that of better efficiency in repression, some evoke blind spots in the law, in particular with regard to the non-respect of anonymity. In effect, the list of management prohibitions inflicted on civilians will be public and accessible to everyone, on the internet. It should be noted that the complete register will only be available to certain legal professionals and that its consultation must be carried out by giving its own identity. “The centralization of information is a good thing and there is no reason to let fraud continue”, warns lawyer Cédric Alter. Which poses a caveat: “However, we go from one extreme to the other, with this law. Previously, the conviction remained a dead letter, and today, it is displayed in public. The stigma of the professional ban will be very strong and very prejudicial. A fair measure would have been to completely limit this to bailiffs, notaries, judges”, considers the lawyer.
Nicholas Ouchinsky also warns of the risks of an overly repressive corporate tribunal. “I observe that the civil courts have a much heavier hand in this area than the criminal courts, and that worries me. We must reflect on the impact of these sentences and apply the sacrosanct principle of proportionality.”
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