Gerard Lhéritier, the founder of The Museum of Museum of Letters and Manuscripts and the head of Aristophil, a fund to invest in rare books and manuscripts that seems to have attracted 16,000 investors and €500m in investment that the French government now suspects is a Ponzi scheme where the fund’s own purchases were the accelerating market:

Bad news for those investors and the IRS TRACFIN, service Bercy responsible for tracking suspects money movements, spotted irregularities in the finances of the group. Fearing that some of the 500 million Aristophil entrusted to its customers is not already vanished, forwarded to the Paris prosecutor’s anti-money laundering body alarmist rating, forcing it to open in the spring for a preliminary investigation ” deceptive trade practices “and” organized fraud. ” Besides the search for evidence, the searches being also intended to seize the assets of the company and its leaders to allow a future customer compensation.

As revealed Charlie Hebdo there a few weeks ago, justice suspects behind the windfall investments offered by Gerard Lhéritier thousands of investors, how Madoff scam. Difficult, indeed, whether the market is really manuscripts booming or if the increase is self-sustaining by Aristophil. A Ponzi new formula, not relying this time on bitter traders gain but collectors blinded by their passion. Founded in 1990, the company Aristophil indeed encourages its customers to put their money not in stocks or bonds, but in letters and manuscripts.

(Apologies for the bad Google translation, click through to read the original French.)

Police raid at the Museum of Letters and Manuscripts   (The Point)