The controversial organisation favoured by stars such as John Travolta and Tom Cruise has been dealt a blow by the French legal system. The Church of Scientology was convicted of fraud and fined more than €500,000 by a Paris court on Tuesday. France has always regarded Scientology as a sect and refused to recognise it as a religion. Unlike the US tax authorities which state that it is "operated exclusively for religious and charitable purposes", the French courts take a slightly different view, believing that it is a purely commercial operation designed to make as much money as possible out of often vulnerable victims.

French investigators said that the group pressured members into paying large sums of money for questionable financial gain and used “commercial harassment” against recruits. Prosecutors had requested that the group be dissolved in France and be fined €2 million but the court stopped short of an outright ban. However, in his indictment judge Jean-Christophe Hullin criticized the Scientologists’ “obsession” with financial gain and for putting members into a “state of subjection.”

The Church of Scientology was founded in 1954 by the late science fiction writer L Ron Hubbard as a successor to his earlier self-help system, Dianetics which uses a counseling technique known as auditing , developed by Hubbard to enable conscious recall of traumatic events in an individual’s past. Scientology teaches that people are immortal spiritual beings who have forgotten their true nature. Its higher levels of initiation have been characterized as bad science fiction by critics.

In the recent French case, the original complaint dates back more than a decade, when a young woman said she took out loans and spent the equivalent of €21,000 on books, courses and “purification packages” after being recruited in 1998. When she sought reimbursement and tried to leave the group, its leadership refused.

Scientology spokeswoman Agnes Bron told the BBC that the verdict was “an Inquisition of modern times,” whilst the head of an association that helps victims of sects, Catherine Picard, called the verdict “intelligent.” Saying, “Scientology can no longer hide behind freedom of conscience.”

The Church is expected to appeal.

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