The trial of two tenors of the Paris bar, Joseph Cohen-Sabban and Xavier Nogueras, suspected of having produced forgeries before an assize court at the end of 2018 to exonerate, in vain, the drug trafficker Robert Dawes, will be held in early 2023, decided Tuesday, August 30 the criminal court.

The hearings will take place from January 23 to February 7, before the 11th correctional chamber, indicated the president during a procedural hearing. The two lawyers were dismissed in February, following a judicial investigation, for “complicity in attempted fraud in judgment” and for “breach of professional secrecy“.

Twenty-two years’ imprisonment

The case began with the trial at the Assizes in December 2018 in Paris of Robert Dawes, accused of having imported 1.3 tonnes of cocaine in 2013 on board an Air France flight connecting Caracas to Paris, a seizure of a amount then estimated at 50 million euros. At the opening of the proceedings, his lawyers had produced a Spanish order which presented as illegal a capital telephone tap for the prosecution and amended several transcripts of conversations in order to exonerate Dawes.

But within days, the court had discarded those documents and called them “fake“. She ended up sentencing Dawes to twenty-two years of criminal imprisonment, while a judicial investigation was opened in March 2019 on these suspicions of forgery. In the order for reference, the first of the three judges hearing the case had conceded that “nothing in the file makes it possible to establish with certainty that one of the four lawyers“cited in the file”knew that the documents presented before the Assize Court were forged“.

“Excess of assertions”

But the magistrate considered that the two councils implicated had “knowingly agreed to give up the independence essential to the exercise of their function by espousing the unfair schemes and schemes employed by Robert Dawes“. “It’s so grotesque and I have so many ways to demonstrate it that the excess of the assertions of this order leaves me unmoved“, reacted in February Me Cohen-Sabban, requested by AFP.

Read alsoThe trial of the Nice attack will open next Monday in Paris

“Under no circumstances did Me Xavier Nogueras participate in the facts of complicity in the attempted fraud in the judgment and he did not violate any ethical rules.“, had estimated his lawyers, Me Matthieu Chirez and Me Hervé Temime. Robert Dawes and his liegeman Evan Hughes will be tried for “attempted fraud in judgment” and for “false in public writing“.

SEE ALSO – Trial of November 13: “At the end of these 10 months, there is frustration”