Former Australia rugby captain Rocky Elsom sentenced to 2 years in prison by French court
Former Australia rugby captain Rocky Elsom was sentenced to two years in prison by a French court on Friday for misusing corporate assets during his time as club president of Narbonne.
He was also fined 100,000 euros ($109,000) with half the sum suspended. The 42-year-old Elsom did not appear in court. His whereabouts are unknown and a French arrest warrant has been issued against him.
He played 75 times for Australia from 2005-11, earning a reputation as a standout flanker.
Elsom was president of southern French club Narbonne from 2015-16. He went on trial for embezzling club funds by making unjustified expenditures to pay a coach or a general manager who was living in Australia at the time. He was acquitted on charges of forgery and use of forgery but was ordered to pay 230,000 euros in compensation to the club's liquidator.
His lawyer Yann Le Bras appealed.
During a trial last month, the prosecutor requested a three-year prison sentence and a fine of 630,000 euros ($687,000). Elsom's lawyer had pleaded for an acquittal.
In a previous trial in October last year, Elsom was sentenced to five years in prison but did not attend the hearing.
He has been the subject of an international arrest warrant since that conviction. As allowed by French law, Elsom requested to be retried with legal representation, but he did not appear in court last month.
Fled Ireland
Elsom was named man of the match when he won the 2009 European Cup with Dublin-based Irish club Leinster alongside Ireland greats Johnny Sexton and Brian O'Driscoll.
He had been living in Ireland since August 2024 and fled the country after an international arrest warrant was issued against him. He denied any wrongdoing and said that under his leadership Narbonne was in a healthy position.
'(Narbonne) achieved solid profits, had good sporting results, and remained in Pro D2 (the second tier of French rugby) until 2016 and beyond,' he said in a statement in October. 'It seems that I have been targeted as a scapegoat for the future mismanagement of this famous rugby club.'
Narbonne won the French Championship twice in 1936 and 1979 and finished runner-up three times. The club went into liquidation in 2018 and now competes in the third-tier Fédérale league.
Elsom had been working as a coach at a school in Dublin around the time of his arrest warrant. Elsom said in an interview four months ago on YouTube that he left immediately with only a single backpack when he found out that Ireland was legally obliged to extradite him to France.
When he gave the interview to Mark Bouris from a hidden location, he said he had not been informed there was a public trial in October.
'This s a really important part of it. I didn't know a court case was on and there was no possible way for me to know,' he said. ___
___
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Boston Globe
15 minutes ago
- Boston Globe
US imposes sanctions on a Palestinian NGO and other charities, accusing them ties to militant groups
The federal government claims that Addameer 'has long supported and is affiliated' with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a secular, left-wing movement with a political party and an armed wing that has carried out deadly attacks against Israelis. Israel and the United States have labeled the PFLP a terrorist organization. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Addameer did not immediately have a comment on the sanctions. Advertisement Israel has alleged that Addameer funds terrorism, a claim that the United Nations previously said it could not support with compelling evidence. In a 2022 The organization also works with Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and is a member of the World Organization Against Torture. Israel's 2022 storming of Addameer's offices, prompted a rebuke from the UN, who said in a statement that Israel had not provided convincing evidence to support the claim. The UN said Addameer was conducting 'critical human rights, humanitarian and development work in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.' Advertisement In February, Zachor Legal Institute, an Israeli-American advocacy group that says it focuses on combatting antisemitism and terrorism, requested Addameer be added to Treasury's sanctions list. Marc Greendorfer, president of Zachor Legal Institute said in an email to the Associated Press that his group is 'very pleased to see Treasury following up on our request.' He said the federal government should act 'to prevent hostile foreign actors from spreading hate and violence in the United States. We applaud Treasury's action and encourage Treasury to expand its focus to the other groups that we identified.' Other entities hit with sanctions Tuesday include: The Gaza-based charity Al Weam Charitable Society and its leader The Turkish charity Filistin Vakfi and its leader El Baraka Association for Charitable and Humanitarian Work and its leader The Netherlands-based Israa Charitable Foundation Netherlands and two employees The Italy-based Associazione Benefica La Cupola d'Oro A Because the majority of crowdfunding activity is legitimate, 'this status can make it more difficult for law enforcement attempting to investigate potential (terrorist financing) cases with a crowdfunding and online fundraising nexus,' the report said. Frankel reported from Jerusalem.
Indianapolis Star
25 minutes ago
- Indianapolis Star
Here's what the woman forcibly removed from Indianapolis meeting wanted to say
Standing outside the City-County Building on June 9 after sheriff's deputies forcibly removed her, Lauren Roberts — a former deputy campaign manager for Mayor Joe Hogsett and the first woman to accuse the mayor's top aide of sexual harassment — read the statement she had planned to share with the Indianapolis City-County Council before she was kicked out. "If I could tell my younger self what Joe Hogsett and his then-campaign manager, Thomas Cook, were about to put me through," Roberts said of her time working for Hogsett from November 2014 to June 2015, during his first mayoral run, "I would tell her to run away and don't look back." Law enforcement's aggressive removal of Roberts is the latest eruption in a conflict made public in July 2024, when IndyStar reported Roberts and two other women's allegations that Cook pressured them toward intimacy and unwanted sexual encounters while he served as their boss under Hogsett. To investigate the claims, the city hired the Chicago-based law firm Fisher Phillips to conduct an investigation. The 54-page final report released May 29 found that the Hogsett administration followed the law in handling the women's claims. But investigators highlighted ethical concerns around Hogsett's decision to allow Cook to resign in 2020, more than two months after an internal recommendation to fire him. What further outraged Roberts and another Cook accuser, however, is what did not appear in the report: that the mayor, who was married and more than 30 years older than each woman at the time, sent them late-night and personal texts alluding to poetry. Fisher Phillips investigators have declined to comment on the omissions. Cook in the past apologized for his conduct. Hogsett, meanwhile, has defended his handling of his past investigations into Cook and did not address IndyStar's questions about the text exchanges. In her statement, Roberts called the Fisher Phillips report a "political performance" because the text messages were left out and Cook wasn't subpoenaed to testify — an authority granted to the council's Investigative Committee. "Fisher Phillips' report made glaring omissions in favor of the mayor's version of events, made sloppy errors about basic facts that we backed with overwhelming documentation, and frequently, in the most misogynistic way, characterized survivors' statements as claims while the mayor's were treated as facts," Roberts said in her statement outside the council meeting. At the June 9 meeting, the council voted to postpone the final $300,000 payment to Fisher Phillips until councilors learn more about why the law firm left out certain details. The council said its Administrative and Finance Committee would hear public comment on the report in its next hearing on June 17 at 5:30 p.m. During her official comments to the council, Roberts spoke for about 10 seconds before a councilor interrupted her to ask whether her speech was relevant to the meeting agenda. After Roberts restarted and accused councilors of trying to silence her with "manipulative back-room conversations," Council President Vop Osili interrupted Roberts. 'You're welcome to have me hauled out by sheriffs, but I'm going to take my time," Roberts told Osili. 'You will have two minutes," Osili replied, invoking the standard time limit for public comment, "and when you are done with that two minutes, you will be done." When the two minutes were up, Osili said, "Ms. Roberts, you are now done." After she refused to stop talking and leave the microphone, Osili said, "Sheriff, you will remove anyone who is talking at this point." Multiple sheriff's deputies pushed Roberts out of the room while she resisted and told them to stop touching her. "It is never a pleasure to escort someone from our room," Osili told media after the meeting. "But we have a sense of order here and we have rules that we have followed … for a very long time. And others have had to abide by those. When someone indicates or says that they will talk for as long as they like, it's not something that this council can stand with." Roberts' overarching message to councilors Monday night was that they should call for Hogsett to resign. So far, three councilors — Democrat Andrew Nielsen, Democratic socialist Jesse Brown and Republican Joshua Bain, who announced his demand Tuesday — have called on Hogsett to resign. Councilor Crista Carlino, chair of the investigative committee, said after Monday's meeting that she was "deeply considering" that possibility. In her statement, Roberts chastised all the councilors for failing to act. "Survivors, whistleblowers, city workers and campaign staff who speak out about abuse are not the problem for the Democratic party, for this administration, or for this council," Roberts said. "Abusers are the problem. Your constituents cannot afford for you to spend another moment wringing your hands or claiming that your role is limited to policymaking."
Yahoo
33 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Meet the judge overseeing the Trump National Guard case: Justice Breyer's brother
Gov. Gavin Newsom's lawsuit against President Donald Trump over the deployment of the National Guard to Los Angeles is in the hands of a federal judge who is the younger brother of retired Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer. U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer, a former Watergate prosecutor nominated to the bench by Bill Clinton in 1997, was assigned to Newsom's case Tuesday, a day after California officials sued to reverse Trump's order. California Attorney General Rob Bonta filed the lawsuit in the U.S. District Court in San Francisco, citing the presence of his and other state offices in that city as justification for the choice of venue. Breyer is one of 13 judges in that courthouse and was assigned the case through a random process overseen by the court clerk. Breyer, who attended Harvard before getting his law degree from the University of California, Berkeley, was confirmed by unanimous consent in the Senate and has served as a judge in the San Francisco-based federal court since. Notably, Trump himself nominated Breyer in 2018 for a second term on the U.S. Sentencing Commission. Breyer, 83, will decide whether Trump had the legal authority to federalize 4,000 California National Guard troops amid street protests over the administration's immigration raids in Los Angeles. Newsom argues that the move was unlawful because Trump bypassed a requirement to coordinate with the governor's office and called up the troops over Newsom's objection. In a 2023 appearance at the Supreme Court alongside his brother, Breyer recalled that he was a local prosecutor during unrest in the Bay Area in the 1960s and 1970s but pressed on with his day-to-day work. 'I was an assistant district attorney. There were riots in San Francisco, over Vietnam over at San Francisco State, close it down,' Charles Breyer said. 'You did your task, which didn't mean that you weren't aware of what was going on or not sensitive to what was going on or tried to understand what was going on, but it meant you had a task.' In 2008, at a public talk alongside other former Watergate figures, Breyer said the Nixon-era scandal proved the value of the Constitution — and in particular, the First Amendment protections for those who 'speak out against the government.' 'We were told from Day One, why are you doing this? You're tearing down the presidency. You're making it very difficult for the president of the United States to discharge his obligations,' Breyer recalled. 'And our answer really was that the Constitution was set up … to allow an examination of the way our government operates. And that's what happened.'
