By Marine Strauss
BRUSSELS (Reuters) – A Belgian lawyer who was acquitted of money-laundering and falsifying documents in a case involving Belgium’s richest family will seek compensation in Belgian courts for damages she suffered after almost a decade of legal proceedings.
Fara Chorfi, 61, was sentenced to 30 months in 2019 by a Geneva court, half of which was suspended, for money laundering and stock fraud targeting heirs to the world’s largest brewer Anheuser Busch InBev.
Her conviction was overturned on appeal last month by the Geneva Court of Justice, erasing her sentence as well as restoring 34 million Swiss francs ($36.78 million) to her along with all her frozen bank accounts and assets, as well as 5 million francs in procedural costs.
Chorfi, who had always denied charges against her, was previously sentenced to 24 months in prison, with 15 months suspended, in 2016 by a Luxembourg court for attempted fraud in a related case involving the 2005 testament of the late AB InBev heiress Amicie de Spoelberch, widow of Luka Bailo.
When Bailo died in 2004, some 915,000 AB InBev bearer shares were removed from a Luxembourg safe deposit box. His Geneva-based sons Patrice and Alexis Bailo de Spoelberch, who had been adopted by Amicie de Spoelberch, asked Chorfi’s law firm to recover those shares, worth more than 3.5 billion euros today ($3.75 billion).
The couple’s sons disagreed over the lawyer’s legal fees, which included AB inBev shares received in the course of Chorfi’s work, and accused her of being behind the vanished shares, leading to her re-arrest in 2017.
Marc Uyttendaele, a lawyer for Chorfi, told Reuters she would seek compensation in Belgian courts for harassment and procedural abuse.
“The heirs used mind-blowing amounts of money and particularly dubious methods to ruin the lawyer who had loyally served their adoptive mother, and to whom they owe their fortune,” Uyttendaele said.
Lawyers for the Bailo de Spoelberg brothers did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
($1 = 0.9243 Swiss francs)
($1 = 0.9345 euros)
(Reporting by Marine Strauss; Editing by Mark Heinrich)
