Isabelle Adjani received a two-year suspended prison sentence and was fined €250,000 for tax fraud in a Paris court on Thursday, PvNew has /confirm/ied.
Adjani, one of France’s most revered female actors, was found guilty of setting up her permanent residency in Portugal between 2016 and 2017 to avoid paying €236,000 in taxes, depositing €120,000 into a U.S. account without declaring it and disguising a €2 million donation into a loan, per the AFP.
Adjani, who was Oscar-nominated for “Camille Claudel” and “The Story of Adele H.,” has denied these claims and will be filing an appeal, her lawyer, Olivier Pardo, told PvNew.
Back in October, the financial prosecutors had requested a suspended sentence of 18 months on top of a €250,000 fine, but the judges gave Adjani a bigger sentence.
“We are dismayed by this ruling,” Pardo said. “Isabelle Adjani couldn’t attend the trial, and we had asked to reschedule it so that she could be there to be heard, but they didn’t allow it. They’re relentlessly going after her.”
The investigation into tax fraud was launched in 2016 after Adjani’s name appeared in the Panama Papers.
Adjani was also under formal investigation for alleged fraud relating to hundreds of thousands of dollars of business expenses since October 2020. The investigation stemmed from a police complaint filed by a former business associate in 2015.
In spite of ongoing legal turmoils, Adjani has seen her career flourish in recent years with a flurry of roles. She just starred as a conwoman in Melanie Laurent’s hit Netflix heist movie, “Voleuses.” She also held the leading role in Francois Ozon’s “Petra von Kant” which opened the Berlin Film Festival in 2022.
