MADRID: Spain’s Ministry of justice has awarded a French businessman €8,400 in compensation for jailjail his term after Spanish police mistook his van-load of soap for a cocaine shipment. Jacques Benoit Fiocconi spent more than two months in a Spanish prison waiting for forensic scientists to correctly identify the fragrant cargo. Fiocconi had asked the Spanish Ministry of Justice for €83,000 to cover financial losses and moral damages resulting from his incarceration.
The Corsica-based cosmetics entrepreneur was arrested when driving along the AP-7 motorway in Catalonia with his father, Laurent Fiocconi, himself a former drug trafficker who was at one time associated with Pablo Escobar.
The pair had just bought 2,850 bars of soap from a factory in Figueres, the birthplace of surrealist artist Salvador Dali.They were heading towards the French border when the vehicle was flagged down by a Civil Guard patrol.
Laurent Fiocconi was less fortunate and was kept in custody in connection with an investigation being carried out by French and Spanish judicial authorities into alleged drug trafficking activities involving Corsican and Marseille-based criminal gangs.
The Ministry of Justice accepted the soap salesman’s argument that he should be compensated for the excessive amount of time he was held in prison, but set damages at what is considered the “standard rate” in such cases, €120 per day.
