Belgian prosecutors have opened a judicial investigation into the activities of one of two companies owned by Anderlecht MR councillors Marcela Gori and Achille Vandyck, Le Vif reported on Thursday.
The couple run two businesses: M.A. Solution, an estate agency, and M.A. Solution Business, a business centre that provides company registration addresses and administrative support to other firms.
Vandyck is a councillor in Anderlecht and vice-chair of the local MR party branch. Gori, vice-president of the local public welfare centre, is also seeking the presidency of Foyer Anderlechtois, the social housing body currently at the centre of a tense political dispute.
That dispute also involves Lotfi Mostefa of the Socialist Party (PS) and a parliamentary inquiry into suspected irregularities linked to him. Those suspicions are already the subject of a separate judicial investigation.
According to Le Vif, the prosecutor’s office confirmed only that "an investigation is under way" and declined further comment "in order to safeguard its effectiveness". The exact scope of the judicial investigation has not been made public.
On 25 June, the financial daily L’Echo reported that M.A. Solution Business had hosted 108 companies whose registered address was later struck off, as well as 45 shell companies that had been wound up or declared bankrupt in recent years.
Several anti-money laundering experts quoted anonymously by the newspaper said addresses linked to repeated liquidations can be a strong indicator of fraud.
L’Echo said its reporting was based on an analysis of open data from Belgium’s Crossroads Bank for Enterprises. Of the 108 deregistered companies, 26 had entrusted M.A. Solution with their administrative formalities.
Gori and Vandyck immediately rejected the allegations and said they would join the case as civil parties.
At the time, they said the “defamatory and slanderous allegations” had seriously damaged both their personal reputations and that of their company, M.A. Solution Business.
“Our professional reputation has been built over many years on strict compliance with legal obligations and the quality of the service we provide to our clients. It is now for the courts to assess the facts and the evidence,” Gori said.
They also said any company operating this type of business must hold authorisation from the Federal Public Service Economy and comply with particularly strict legal obligations, especially on anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing.
In their view, L’Echo’s interpretation was “totally wrong”, and all the deregistrations had been carried out voluntarily by their company as part of its legal obligations.
