Police raids on Mulliez sites in France, Belgium, Luxembourg

Police in France, Belgium and Luxembourg carried out raids Tuesday on premises of the Mulliez distribution group as part of an enquiry into possible fiscal fraud, judicial sources said.

The enquiry has been open for eight months following a “complaint from a member of the Mulliez family,” a source said.

The family is one of France’s wealthiest, controlling a distribution network empire throughout Europe that includes the Auchan retail chain, Decathlon and Leroy-Merlin.

According to the judicial source “masses of documents” were seized in the searches on Tuesday which will take weeks to sift through.

One of the raids took place in the northern French town of Roubaix, where the Mulliez group is headquartered.

In Belgium, judges received a formal request from the French authorities for the action, a local prosecutor there told AFP.

Auchan’s communications arm did not comment when contacted by AFP.