The French-American art dynasty scion Guy Wildenstein has been cleared of hiding paintings and properties worth hundreds of millions of euros from the French authorities after one of the biggest tax fraud trials ever held in the country.

State prosecutors had wanted the 71-year-old to be sentenced to two years in prison and given a €250m (£217m) fine over what they called “the longest and most sophisticated” tax fraud scheme in modern-day France. But judges in Paris cleared him and seven other defendants of all charges.

The presiding judge, Olivier Geron, said there was a “clear attempt” by Wildenstein and the other defendants to hide assets but that shortcomings in the investigation and in French legislation on tax fraud made it impossible to return a guilty verdict. Both the “powerful and the poor” had an equal right to justice, Geron said.



Jocelyn Wildenstein, née Perisse, became known by the unflattering nickname ‘Bride of Wildenstein’ due to the effects of her cosmetic surgery. Photograph: Jamie McCarthy/WireImage

The celebrated Wildenstein art clan – known in the French art world as simply “les W” – is as famous for its family feuds and eccentricities as its huge collection of old masters. The much-mocked cosmetic surgery of a former sister-in-law of Guy Wildenstein led to her becoming the face of the family’s excesses.

Prosecutors accused the family, whose art business was founded in Paris in the late 19th century, of using a web of opaque trusts and tax havens to avoid paying about €550m in tax.

Guy Wildenstein’s co-defendants were his nephew Alec Jr, his estranged Russian sister-in-law Liouba Stoupakova, a notary, two lawyers and two offshore trusts. The case would probably never have seen the light of day had various Wildenstein widows and former wives, feeling shortchanged, not lifted the lid on the clan’s business dealings.



French tax authorities accused the defendants of grossly undervaluing the Wildenstein estate to minimise inheritance taxes. Described as the “trial of the missing millions”, the case raised questions about the system of financial management and opaque offshore trusts used by France’s wealthiest people.

The list of assets discussed in the case was eye-watering, and included the family’s 30,000-hectare private compound and wildlife sanctuary in Kenya, where parts of the film Out of Africa were shot, to racehorses, stables, a New York apartment, dozens of paintings and a Gulfstream jet.

The authorities allege that following the death of their father, Daniel, in 2001, Guy and his brother Alec, who died in 2008, began transferring assets out of France.

Guy Wildenstein is the heir of three generations of art dealers and racehorse breeders. His great-grandfather Nathan Wildenstein was an Alsace cloth merchant who amassed a large art collection that was passed to his son Georges, a patron of Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí and Max Ernst.

Alec Wildenstein pictured in 2004. He died in 2008. Photograph: Simon Roberts/Rex Features

When Nazi Germany invaded France, Georges fled to the US. His son Daniel expanded the family’s art collection to make it one of the biggest in private hands anywhere in the world, encompassing Renoir, Caravaggio, El Greco and Monet, and cementing his own reputation as an art dealer, collector and historian.

Such was the family’s wealth that Daniel’s second wife, Sylvia, once described to lawyers how her thankful husband once bought an island in the West Indies because it had provided shelter to their yacht in a storm.

But the family’s personal battles were to tear them apart. After Daniel’s death at the age of 84, Sylvia accused her stepsons of tricking her out of her inheritance by claiming their father died broke. “I knew something was wrong when they took away my horses,” she told a French magazine. Sylvia battled for years to hunt down the missing “treasure”, including several paintings by old masters.

Sylvia, who died in 2010, likened the long-running family battle to the US soap opera Dallas. But it was through the efforts of several other women aggrieved at their treatment by the Wildensteins that lifted the veil of secrecy over the family fortune. Daniel’s late son Alec was a fixture on France’s society pages during his messy divorce from the Swiss socialite Jocelyn Perisse. She was given the unflattering nickname “Bride of Wildenstein” due to the effects of her extensive cosmetic surgery, which her ex-husband reportedly said was intended to make her face look more feline.

Guy Wildenstein, a close friend of the former French president Nicolas Sarkozy, claimed during the trial that he was mystified by the labyrinthine tax schemes put in place by Alec and his father. He also argued that there was no legal obligation to report his trust-held assets following his father’s death.