An Australian has decided to sue the French state for 500,000 francs (76,225 euros) damages after spending nearly four months in a Lyon prison in 1998, suspected of the fraudulent sale of World Cup football tickets.
Barrister Jean-Marie Chanon said his client Bruce Stanton, who at the time was a Swiss-domiciled ticket seller for sporting events, had issued a writ against the state in a court here for what he considered illegal detention.
A first hearing, of a technical nature, was to take place next Thursday.
Stanton was arrested on July 8 1998 at Bellegarde station near the border between France and Switzerland under an international extradition order for fraud issued by Geneva examining magistrate Carole Barbey.
Tour operators had complained of never receiving tickets they had ordered for the World Cup, which was held in France in the summer of 1998. Hundreds of people had lost out, to the tune of hundreds of thousands of Swiss francs.
Locked up in this southeastern French town, the Australian ticket seller protested his innocence. He claimed he had been tricked by intermediaries and came to France to buy tickets to supply his clients and save his professional integrity.
On August 21 the same year the Lyon appeal court gave the go-ahead for his extradition but it was not until October 23 that the same court agreed to a request by Stanton's lawyers that he be released on the grounds that he had been locked up for too long.
The Australian, who had also spent a week in prison in Switzerland where he had returned to give his side of the story to the judge, was finally cleared by the Swiss courts in a decision confirmed in May 2000 by a Geneva tribunal -- LYON, France (AFP)
© 2001 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
