One of France’s most popular actors will have a starring role in court when a fake Irish aristocrat goes on trial accused of cheating him out of millions of euros.
Dany Boon, director and star of Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis (Welcome to the Sticks), France’s biggest box office hit, says an alleged conman, who claimed to be an Oxford-educated maritime lawyer, stole nearly €7m (£6m) from him as part of an elaborate scam.
Next month, the court in Nice will seek to unpick a bizarre and convoluted story that could have come straight out of one of Boon’s movies, featuring luxury yachts, tax havens, multiple aliases, royal connections and an international manhunt.
The man Boon says he knew as Terry Birles – whose real name is Thierry Fialek-Birles – reportedly appeared completely at home when he dined at the Royal Cork Yacht Club in November 2021. Fellow sailing enthusiasts told the Irish Independent the smooth-talking and smartly dressed young man in his 30s came across as cultured, classy and wealthy.
He allegedly led them to believe he came from an “ancient” Irish family and that his parents had died in a helicopter crash in Connemara when he was nine. He owned two classic racing yachts and had bought a 17-bedroom property in Youghal, County Cork, which he was planning to restore while commuting between Ireland and Monaco where his girlfriend, a successful Chinese business executive, was an adviser for the Prince Albert of Monaco Foundation, he allegedly said.
Several months before the dinner, Fialek-Birles, who claimed he had been educated in Britain and Italy and had a master’s degree from Oxford University, had reportedly met Boon in Monaco and been engaged to renovate the actor’s recently acquired yacht, Umaren, a 21-metre vessel estimated at €3.5m.
In hearings in 2022 and 2023, an Irish court was told the actor transferred more than €2.2m to a Dublin-registered company, South Seas Merchants Mariners Ltd Partnership (SSMM), which Fialek-Birles said had been founded by his family more than a century before, for the maintenance, management and insurance of Umaren.
A few months later, Fialek-Birles is alleged to have convinced the comedian to invest €4.5m, via SSMM, in a scheme with the Irish Central Bank that paid 3.25% annual interest tax free.
When a suspicious Boon – alerted by an anonymous person who claimed to have had dealings with the alleged conman – asked for his money back, he said Fialek-Birles replied that SSMM had been sold to an Italian family and he should sue them for his millions, it was reported.
Fialek-Birles then apparently disappeared. Boon hired private investigators, who reportedly discovered the “Irish aristocrat” had at least two passports, a network of companies, and addresses in Paris, Roquebrune-Cap-Martin on the French Riviera, Monaco, on the West Indian island of St Kitts and in Guadeloupe in the Caribbean.
In a hearing at the Dublin high court three years ago that led to the freezing of Fialek-Birles’s assets, Boon’s counsel, Rossa Fanning SC, now the Irish attorney general, said the French actor had been the victim of an “elaborate fraud” and had been told “lie after lie”.
Fanning told the court one of Fialek-Birles’s network of companies turned out to be a hardware store in Samoa. Boon’s representatives said they had discovered that neither the investment scheme nor the Italian family existed and Fialek-Birles, listed as a municipal councillor in the Paris suburb of Le Chesnay in 2008, was believed to have transferred the actor’s money to offshore accounts in Panama and South Korea.
The only online reference for one of the accused’s other aliases, is a “Commodore Sir Thierry Waterford-Mandeville” of the West Indies Yacht Club. None of the website links work, the number listed appears not to exist, and when the Guardian messaged the email address it was returned as address not known.
Fialek-Birles was arrested in Panama in February 2024 after Interpol issued an international search notice and extradited him to France six months later. He initially denied the accusations, but last month applied to be released on bail before his trial. At the hearing he was reported as saying he wanted to “make amends” and repay Boon. The court refused his application. His trial on charges of fraud, money laundering, forgery and use of forged documents will begin in Nice on 26 September.
It is not known if Boon, whose real name is Daniel Farid Hamidou and who did French voiceovers in Shark Tale and Frozen 2, will attend. The actor has made no comment.