Patrick Balkany reached the Fleury-Mérogis prison in a car, quietly, shortly after 1:30 p.m. on Monday, February 7, 2022. He was 73. AFP journalists at the gate saw him arrive. A few hours earlier, the Evreux prosecutor, Dominique Puechmaille, had announced his imprisonment outside the gendarmerie at Vexin-sur-Epte, where she had summoned the former Levallois-Perret mayor.
The gendarmerie sits about ten kilometers from the mill at Cossy, in Giverny, where Balkany and his wife Isabelle had been under house arrest since March 2021, wearing electronic bracelets.
Why the bracelets came off
The Rouen appeal court confirmed on February 3 that the bracelet arrangement for both spouses was revoked. The sentence being served was three years in prison for tax fraud, confirmed on appeal on March 4, 2020. The court cited about a hundred incidents in which the bracelets went off, and said the couple had “never accepted” the constraints of home detention under electronic monitoring. It also pointed to what it called the “vehement or ironic” and at times “outrageous” attitude of Balkany toward prison staff and the sentencing judge.
A judicial source put it more bluntly on the perimeter: the beep never stopped, because each time they were at the edge of the permitted area.
Money was the other sore point. Puechmaille spoke of a “total absence of effort” to clear the tax debt behind the conviction. The couple owes the tax authority 5.3 million euros, plus 766,759 euros that Isabelle owes on her own. Asked on BFM how much had been repaid, the prosecutor said the payments added up to about 2,000 euros. “They spent their time playing with fire,” she said on February 4. “When you play with fire, you get burned.”
A harder prison, and a defense that objected
This was not Balkany’s first stay behind bars. He was held at La Santé from September 2019, when he was convicted at first instance, until February 2020, when he was freed on health grounds under light judicial supervision. More than half of his sentence still had to be served, Puechmaille said.
His lawyer, Romain Dieudonné, fought the decision, calling it “worrying in law and in fact” because of his client’s health. On BFMTV he asked whether Balkany could really go back to prison and said he thought not. Fleury-Mérogis, he added, “is unquestionably a harder prison than La Santé”, and it felt like “an additional sentence”. The bracelet was due to end on March 10, 2022, a few weeks away.
The prosecutor answered the medical argument directly. By picking Fleury-Mérogis, she said, the prison administration had offered a site with round-the-clock medical follow-up.
Isabelle Balkany, 74, was not with him. She had been in hospital since the previous Thursday after a suicide attempt, and her own bracelet had also been revoked. Her situation was to be settled later. As long as she was in a health facility and not fit for detention, Puechmaille said, she would not deal with her, though a sentence remained to be served.
Sources
- Retour en prison pour Patrick Balkany condamné pour fraude fiscale (L'Express, AFP)
- Le placement des Balkany sous bracelet électronique annulé parce qu'ils ne faisaient aucun « effort » (20 Minutes)
- Leurs bracelets électroniques révoqués, les Balkany retournent en prison (La Croix)
