(JTA) — A Jewish man described by French police as a gangster was shot five times and severely wounded in Paris.
The incident occurred Sunday evening in Paris’ upscale 16th district, approximately a mile away the Eiffel Tower. The victim, identified as Dominique Guez, sustained at least one shot to the head from a drive-by shooting as he was parking his scooter on Flandrin Boulevard near the Arc de Triomph in eastern Paris, according to the RTL radio and television broadcaster. Two unidentified men opened fire on Guez from a moving car.
The two shooters escaped with a third accomplice in a vehicle that had been torched not far from the scene of the crime. According to the Le Point weekly, Guez was shot outside his home.
Quoting police sources, the Le Parisien weekly reported the victim is “a member of the Jewish crime scene” with multiple convictions for fraud.
According to Le Point, the victim is connected to Arnaud Mimran, a French Jew who in July was sentenced to eight years in prison for defrauding, with several partners, the European Union out of 282 million euros, about $315 million.
Mimran, who was convicted of tax offenses in France in the late 1990s, used front companies to collect VAT returns from France on carbon emissions permits that he bought from countries that did not collect VAT on them, like the Netherlands. Known as the carbon emissions scam, it is believed to have caused billions in damages in 2009 by fraudulently exploiting the differences in how industrialized nations encouraged reducing emission of greenhouse gases.
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