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French police summon Gérard Depardieu over suspected sexual assault

French police summoned cinema legend Gérard Depardieu on Monday over suspected incidents of sexual assault with a view towards placing him in custody for questioning, a police source said.

French police summon Gérard Depardieu over suspected sexual assault
Actor Gérard Depardieu has long been a polarising figure in France due to repeated allegations of sexual assault. Photo: AFP

Police were to question the actor over two women’s allegations that he assaulted them – one on a film set in 2014 and the other on another shoot in 2021, the source said, confirming a report by the BFMTV television channel.

The first woman accuses him of having assaulted her when she was a member of the crew on the 2022 feature film “The Green Shutters”.

The set designer, who filed a formal complaint in February, told investigative website Mediapart that Depardieu grabbed her as she left the set in a private hotel in Paris, groping her and making obscene comments, before his bodyguards removed him.

The second woman has alleged he groped her “all over” and made “inappropriate” remarks while she was an assistant on the set of 2015 film “Le magician et le Siamois” (“The Magician and the Siamese”), she told regional newspaper Le Courrier de l’Ouest.

Depardieu already faces a rape charge, as well as claims of assault by more than a dozen women – all of which he has strongly denied.

“Never ever have I abused a woman,” Depardieu wrote in Le Figaro newspaper in October.

Police in 2020 charged Depardieu with rape and sexual assault after actor Charlotte Arnould alleged he raped her in 2018 when she was 22.

Another sexual assault complaint filed last year by actor Hélène Darras, who said Depardieu groped and propositioned her during a 2007 film shoot, has been dropped for being past the statute of limitations.

Spanish journalist and author Ruth Baza said in December she had filed a criminal complaint in Spain against Depardieu, claiming he raped her in 1995 in Paris.

Despite the events having passed the statute of limitations, she said she decided to file her complaint hoping it would “help other people” to do the same.

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CRIME

French court confiscates 9 chateaux from Chinese magnate

A French court has ordered the confiscation of nine Bordeaux wine country châteaux acquired by a Chinese magnate convicted of laundering Chinese government funds.

French court confiscates 9 chateaux from Chinese magnate

Naijie Qu, 63, head of the Haichang Group based northeastern Chinese port city of Dalian, was also sentenced to a suspended three-year jail term and fined one million euros.

The fine was €400,000 more than requested by prosecutors, who had asked for a four-year suspended jail term.

Haichang is a trading and shipping company which also has interests in property, tourism and agriculture.

It was the biggest of numerous Chinese investors which bought into one of France’s most famous wine-growing regions in the early 2010s.

French police seized the estates in 2018 after finding evidence of tax fraud and use of forged documents, including to obtain a €30-million loan by the Chinese bank ICBC’s branch in Paris.

The châteaux were put in the name of Qu’s wife in Hong Kong via a series of elaborately named shell companies in the tax haven of the British Virgin Islands.

China’s National Audit Office (NAO) has said that Haichang had been granted public money by state authorities to buy foreign technology, but had instead purchased vineyards in France.

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