Month: January 2017

A Monaco company has been given a hefty fine for abuse of confidence. Monaco Yachting & Technologies must pay €90,000 and €20,000 in damages and interest following a ruling against the firm by Monaco’s criminal court.

The company had been entrusted with €2.65 million towards the cost of building a yacht, a sum that should have been lodged in a special account.

However, although the initial agreement for the building of the vessel was signed in 2008, the client, a company registered in the Isle of Man, had complained that the money paid as a deposit had been used by Monaco Yachting & Technologies for general expenses. Despite repeated attempts to resolve the matter without resorting to the courts, the client brought the case before the criminal court in Monaco.

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The prize-giving ceremony of the festival of short films “Le Temps Presse”, which has been supported by the Monegasque Cooperation since its first edition, took place on January 9 at the Hôtel de Ville in Paris.

Co-chaired by Muhammad Yunus, inventor of microcredit and Nobel Peace Prize winner, and director Wim Wenders, this sixth edition rewarded six short films based on the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.

Among the prizes awarded by the Monaco Government, the Children’s Prize attracted more than 1,000 students aged 8 to 14, enrolled in Monaco and in the partner institutions of the Monegasque Cooperation in Madagascar, Burundi, Senegal, Tunisia and Mali. The animated film “The Change” by Fabian Ribezzo, about the solidarity of an African tribe in the face of climate change, aroused the enthusiasm of young audiences.

The students of Sciences Po Paris-Middle Eastern Mediterranean Campus in Menton awarded their prize to the short film “Out of the Village” by Jonathan Stein, which deals with the effects of the Ebola epidemic on human relationships.

Finally, the Women’s Prize was awarded to the director Daniel Montanarini for her film “The Arrival” on women becoming mother. The jury president was HSH Princess Stephanie. (Feature photo: Palais Princier de Monaco)

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After nearly a century in Monaco, the International Hydrographic Organisation will enter its second century under a revised governance structure, with the 1st Session of the IHO Assembly taking place from April 24 to 28, 2017.

Over 300 delegates representing its 85 member states, together with representatives from international and non-governmental organisations and observers from other states and industry will meet in the Auditorium Rainier III.

The IHO is the intergovernmental consultative and technical organisation whose principal aim is to ensure that all the world’s seas, oceans and navigable waters are adequately surveyed and charted.

There will be plenty for the IHO Assembly to consider, at a time when mankind is looking ever more closely at the seas and oceans in terms of its environmental impact and its economic resources. Yet, our knowledge of most of the seas and oceans remains relatively poor, the IHO says. There are better maps of the Moon and Mars than for most of the oceans. IHO figures show that less than 15 percent of the deeper ocean waters have been directly measured, while up to 50 percent of the world’s coastal waters have yet to be surveyed.

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On Wednesday, January 11, Marie-Pierre Gramaglia, Minister of Public Works, the Environment and Urban Development, visited the Place des Moulins post office, which has been renovated recently with an additional service window added.

The Financial Advisory service has been moved to the post office of La Scala (Monte-Carlo). These renovations followed the closure of the Larvotto post office, as part of the redevelopment of public facilities related to the Palais de la Plage development.

The post office at Place des Moulins welcomes 93,000 customers a year. It covers a delivery area of 5,939 private mailboxes, 25 percent of all mailboxes in the Principality, and 125 businesses.

La Poste Monaco in figures distributed 16.6 million letters in 2016, a decline of 18.6 percent over the last four years. A total of 309,000 parcels were distributed in 2016, some 15 percent more than in 2015. The postal service in Monaco had an estimated turnover of €19.6 million last year, up four percent compared to 2015.

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A man from Grasse is the latest to appear in court in Monaco for taking advantage of one of the Principality’s top hotels. The individual in question reserved a room at the Hermitage and ran up a bill over several days totalling €1,411.

Armed with his brother’s ID, a bankcard and a mobile phone, the culprit temporarily fooled the concierge by leaving in his care a “valuable” painting that turned out to be a worthless fake. Unable to debit the bankcard, the concierge consulted Google and discovered that Eric Piedoie had committed a string of crimes in France, in particular for counterfeiting 68 works of a famous sculptor, Cesar Baldaccini, for which he was given four years in jail.

Questioned in court about the debit card, he said that if the hotel had asked him he would have been happy to pay in cash. However, the defendant’s brother had brought a criminal complaint in France over the theft of his identity by his brother, a fact that didn’t help the case of the accused.

Prosecuting, Cyrielle Colle called into question the efficiency of the hotel registration process in the Principality, and asked for nine months jail for the guilty guest. The tribunal agreed, and Mr Piedoie was condemned to spend considerably longer in Monaco than he had originally planned.

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