An eight-year prison sentence was confirmed on appeal on Friday against a dentist from Marseille (southeast France) who was accused of mutilating around 400 patients in the city’s working-class areas.
The highest-paid ex-dentist in France, Lionel Guedj, 43, videotaped from his prison announcing this verdict, is therefore being held in custody.
The court also confirmed the five-year prison sentence imposed in the first instance against his father Jean-Claude Guedj, 71, who was also a dentist at the time of the events and appeared free. An arrest warrant was issued against him.
The judges of the Aix-en-Provence Court of Appeal, who moved to the extraordinary hearing room of the former Muy barracks in Marseille in this case, were less strict than the prosecutor general who had asked for a ten-year prison sentence against Lionel Guedj.
From 2006 to 2012, the practice of Lionel Guedj, a young dentist, was located in one of the poorest districts of Marseille and was “a money machine running at full speed,” denounced the public prosecutor’s office.
Lionel Guedj, imprisoned since September 8, 2022, was accused of devitalizing around 3,900 healthy teeth in hundreds of patients in order to then install very profitable bridges, with no other motive than to increase his sales.
In five years he had become the highest paid dentist in France: he drove a Ferrari, earned between 65,000 and 80,000 euros a month and had amassed a fortune of 13 million euros.
“People have been reduced to mere instruments in the service of your fraud,” the attorney general told him, describing the defendant as a “dealer” whose chatter and charm had lulled the trust of his many patients.
Jean-Claude, known as “Carnot” Guedj, a dentist at the end of his career, was prosecuted for contributing to his son’s fraud, particularly by providing “customer service to suffering patients.”
On the financial side, the appeal court confirmed the confiscations already ordered by the Marseille criminal court, which targeted real estate, vehicles, a boat, bank accounts and works of art worth just over 2.2 million euros.