Six months after the death of investment banker Jean-Marc Forneri, two of his accomplices were convicted of "aggravated laundering of tax evasion".

To read the judgment of the 32nd chamber of the Paris Criminal Court, Mr. Forneri, against whom the public action was extinguished because of his death, had organised, in particular by means of front companies in the Bahamas, the concealment of a part of his income and assets to reduce his income and wealth taxes. A search of his home in March 2017, a request for mutual legal assistance addressed to the United Kingdom in 2016 and three requests for mutual assistance addressed to the courts of the Bahamas in 2016 and 2017 will have been necessary to discover numerous offshore bank accounts which have allowed to launder 6.6 million euros of tax evasion since 2005. The court describes in detail the "fraudulent processes undeniably put in place voluntarily by Mr. Forneri to conceal his assets and launder his undeclared income".

Only the accomplices of these arrangements, a Swiss lawyer based in Geneva and a French financial intermediary based in London, therefore appeared at the hearing on May 17 before the Paris court. The first was sentenced to eighteen months in prison suspended and 300,000 euros fine, with a five-year ban on practicing the profession of lawyer and adviser in wealth management and taxation. The second to twelve months suspended prison sentence, 150,000 euros fine and, also, a ban on carrying out any asset management activity for five years. Each was also ordered to pay 50,000 euros to the French State, which had brought a civil action in this case. These sentences are not final since the judgment has been appealed. In the obituary devoted by Le Monde to Jean-Marc Forneri, the president of the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region, Renaud Muselier, a childhood friend, greeted a "man of influence, brilliant and hardworking, who, paradoxically, has always been able to carry out his action as an investment banker and a servant of the State in parallel”. The character was obviously more equivocal with regard to the state.