Annie Bouty

Annie Bouty was a Brussels lawyer specializing in the law on foreigners and from 1975 to 1983 the companion of Jean-Michel Nihoul, with whom she had a son, Jean-Michel, and a daughter, Gentiane; she was later struck off the bar.²⁴ Having just left the bar, she founded with a Mr. Flier in 1985 a legal-aid association, Cadreco, in whose name Nihoul approached the Belgian Justice Department on behalf of its clients; it handled about 300 files before going into liquidation in 1987. In November 1985 she set up two subsidiaries of Cadreco in Lagos, Nigeria, Law and Cadreco Ltd Commercial Company, dealing in import and export, the management of football players and legal help for Nigerians wishing to emigrate to Belgium. On September 20, 1989, the Brussels Court of Appeal sentenced her to two years' imprisonment, suspended, for breach of trust and violation of professional secrecy committed while she was still a lawyer. She and Flier were then prosecuted for fraud and fraudulent insolvency; Flier's case was dismissed, and on February 21, 1997, the Court of Appeal sentenced Bouty, who had obtained papers for foreigners in irregular situations, to two months.²

The parliamentary commission of inquiry described an episode in which Nihoul telephoned a gendarmerie officer, at Bouty's instigation according to her own statement in a police report of October 2, 1989, about a gendarme investigating Cadreco; she later claimed that the gendarme had been transferred because of her, which the commission found false but which she used as a threat against the gendarmes questioning her. The commission called the episode illustrative of "the arrogance and the nerve" of Nihoul and Bouty at the time and of how they turned their illegal interventions to account, and found in the officer's response a sign of the erosion of standards. After her suspension from the bar, she often called on the same lawyers as Nihoul.²

Bouty was detained in 1996 in the Dutroux investigation.¹ She was not among the four defendants tried at Arlon in 2004, Marc Dutroux, Michelle Martin, Michel Lelievre and Nihoul.³ On May 3, 2004, she testified for nearly two hours about her life with Nihoul, insisting that he had never taken her to orgies and that she could not imagine he would have kept quiet about pedophilia had he known of it.⁴

Allegations

In the X-Dossier, compiled under Jean-Marc Connerotte and Michel Bourlet, Regina Louf accused Bouty of taking part in sadomasochistic events. The writer S. Dovey wrote that her practice overlapped with the circles of Jean-Paul Dumont and the Lippens family and handled matters for Nihoul's companies, including ASCO, and that her statements described Nihoul's specifications for victims, the filming of parties for blackmail, his connections to Paul Vanden Boeynants and the Lippens family, and links to CRIES and UNICEF through Dumont.¹