Eight years for the son, five for the father: Lionel and Carnot Guedj were heavily condemned Thursday and placed in detention. The two men had set up a “system” of “systematized treatments” with the sole purpose of “diverting profits” according to justice.
Le Monde with AFP
At the trial of dental mutilation, Lionel and Carnot Guedj, the son and the father, ex-dentists Marseille, were sentenced to 8 and 5 years in prison, Thursday September 8, and immediately placed in detention.
holding his arm, hidden behind surgical masks, the son, 42, and the father, 71, listened to the long and overwhelming motivation of the Marseille Criminal Court. For the magistrates, the two men had set up a “system” of “uniform and systematized treatments”, without medical justification, with the sole purpose of “diverting profits”.
And the pain was up to the task: eight years for Lionel Guedj, five for his father. A decision greeted by the applause of the hundred complainants on the benches of the public. But this reaction was immediately interrupted by the president, Céline Ballerini, for whom we should “never be delighted with a prison sentence”.
Then the magistrate continued her long motivation, with a lot of pedagogy, explaining that these sorrows are justified by “the number of victims”, the duration of the facts (six years), “the very serious damage” to social security And the “very strong sums committed to repair” these patients. By pronouncing a final ban on exercising, she considered that they had “abused” a “respectable status of knowing who overwhelms” their cases.
“We have done justice”
If this judgment is deemed “difficult” on the side of the defense, which will appeal, on the side of the victims “a weight is gone”. “The sanction is heavy and criticized in terms of proportionality,” said Lionel Guedj’s lawyer, Me Frédéric Monneret. But for Christmas Kouici, who has “already” a denture, at 52, “we were done justice, we were not left like people in the northern neighborhoods, we were respected”.
Messaouda got twelve devitalized teeth in the Guedj cabinet: “It is a good justice in which I no longer believed,” she comments, relieved. “They have reconciled with the institution,” said Marc Ceccaldi, a lawyer for sixty victims, for whom the “severity” of the sentences is “proportional with the gravity of the facts”. A feeling of having been listened to therefore, in the public, but also relief, because these convictions pave the way for compensation, after ten years of waiting, especially since the Guedj will not call on civil interests.
best paid dentist in the country
Placed under judicial supervision since their indictment, in November 2012, Lionel and Carnot Guedj had never done a single day of pre -trial detention. Thursday evening they will spend their first night behind bars, in Draguignan prison, where they will be placed in isolation.
Far, therefore, from Marseille, where Lionel Guedj settled in 2005, in the northern districts, among the poorest in the city. He had come to “scratch the CMU” (universal medical coverage), had gone the prosecution at the hearing, in the spring, stressing that in 2010 this practitioner had become the best paid dentist in France, with 2.9 million euros fees.
According to a calculation of the prosecution, this young dentist described as amendment had devitalized 3,900 healthy teeth between 2006 and 2012, without any therapeutic justification, out of 327 patients, for the sole purpose of placing them very remunerative bridges. He posed twenty-eight times more prostheses than the average of French dentists, said social security. And the father “did not brake” the son, “on the contrary he was following him,” said the president on Thursday.
The prosecution had claimed ten years in prison against Lionel Guedj, the maximum sentence, and five years in prison, one of which was suspended probationary against his father. Leaving the old barracks where this extraordinary trial was held, the police vehicle transporting them to their cells was accompanied by the hoots. Far from the serenity of the six weeks of debate, five months ago.