A firm supporter of transparency and accountability, the presence of judge Michel Claise is relatively frequent in the Belgian press, either to raise awareness about financial crime ("a Greta Thunberg is needed for clean finance"), to criticize the government for the scarce resources with which justice works (“they send us to war with slingshots”), their inaction in the face of tax fraud (“politicians seem to take Xanax [an anxiolytic] instead of Viagra”) or, perhaps, presenting their latest novel.
Of anything, in short, except for his cases, very juicy in general, especially the one he is currently dealing with. Claise, known as "the sheriff", "the magistrate who does not fear the powerful" or "monsieur 100 million" for his ability to recover money from the public coffers, is the investigating judge in charge of Qatargate, a bribery scheme in which Morocco presumably also participates.
He is a born storyteller, with a sense of theatrics, who enjoys dialectical disputes. Passionate about his work, he is enthusiastic when narrating what he calls “bingo moments”, when the investigation of a case produces greater results than expected. However, when he was studying Law at the Free University of Brussels (ULB) he did not dream of being an investigating judge but a lawyer (he practiced as such for 25 years) and at school it was clear to him that his destiny lay in letters or numbers. You would need both.
Born in 1956, Claise defines himself as “an accident”. His mother was barely 17 years old when she gave birth, and his father was 20. Social pressure led them to get married, but after a short time they separated and abandoned him in a carrycot at his maternal grandparents' house, owners of a bakery in Anderlecht. , a working-class neighborhood of Brussels. They were the ones who raised him. “It was a family that loved me, but obviously it was difficult,” Claise explained in an in-depth interview with Le Soir in 2020.
Her grandmother, who collaborated with the anti-fascist resistance by welcoming paratroopers into her home and once slapped a Gestapo agent across the face, was a very strict woman who made her employees work piecemeal. She also him. At the age of 12, she would get up before six in the morning to help cut bread before going to class. They had no television, so books were her main entertainment. Endowed with high capacities, his teachers and his grandparents encouraged him to study at the university.
He graduated from the prestigious ULB, a secular institution founded in 1834 by Freemasons to which he is still linked. It was then that Claise came into contact with these circles guided by the principle of "questioning everything", which he considers key to his intellectual and personal enrichment. “Being a Freemason does not chain me to anything. I am free”, but freedom “is a right and an obligation”. In Belgium there are no taboos about it, it is not uncommon to see obituaries with the compass symbol and the phrase died "true to his philosophical convictions".
Claise worked for more than two decades as a lawyer, during which time he came into contact with Chilean exiles in Brussels through his cousin, a partner of President Salvador Allende's former chief of staff. The story inspired one of his novels, Copper. Others have to do with the adventures and dramas of the war that his grandmother told her (Salle des pas perdu) or situations that he sees through his work (Crime d'initiés). In addition to essays on financial crime, he has published a dozen novels, some of them crime novels, which have won him several literary awards.
In 2001, he was sworn in as a trial judge to handle financial crime cases. He is famous for fearing no one. Though some colleagues take issue with his expeditious methods, Claise has handled numerous sensitive dossiers and scored impressive victories. The biggest, in the case of Belgium against HSBC. Drawing on the Falciani list, Claise accused the bank of tax fraud and managed to fine it almost 300 million euros, a record in Belgium. Father of two children, he has chained four long relationships with as many women throughout his life, "all important". Today, he continues to teach economic law classes at the ULB, which has allowed him to keep up to date in an increasingly complex field in terms of techniques.
Ten days ago, he personally participated in the arrest of Eva Kaili, Vice President of the European Parliament, after catching her father with a suitcase containing 750,000 euros in cash. Perhaps she sang bingo, because it is said that they did not expect to catch such a big fish that day. The next day, her hand did not tremble to call the president Roberta Metsola and make her hurry back from Malta to be present at the search of the house of another MEP. A movie case, in short, for a unique judge and, above all, with a reputation for never letting go of his prey, however powerful they may be. "I don't feel like sheriff, I just do my job within the respect of the law."
