The former Leinster rugby player and Australia captain Rocky Elsom was sentenced to two years in prison by a French court on Friday, for misusing corporate assets during his time as the club president of Narbonne.
Elsom was also fined €100,000 with half of that sum suspended. The 42-year-old did not appear in court; his whereabouts are currently unknown and a French arrest warrant has been issued against him.
Having taken charge of the southern French club Narbonne from 2015-16, Elsom 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.
Elsom was acquitted on charges of forgery but was ordered to pay €230,000 in compensation to the club’s liquidator. His lawyer, Yann Le Bras, appealed and pleaded for a further acquittal during a trial last month. Instead, the prosecutor requested a three-year prison sentence and a fine of €630,000.
At 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.
Elsom played 75 times for Australia from 2005-11, earning a reputation as a standout flanker. He was named man of the match when he won the 2009 Heineken Cup with Leinster alongside the likes of Johnny Sexton and Brian O’Driscoll.
Born in Melbourne, Elsom had been living in Ireland since August 2024 but fled the country after an international arrest warrant was issued against him. Elsom denied any wrongdoing and said that under his leadership Narbonne was in a healthy position.
“[The club] 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 rugby championship twice in 1936 and 1979 and finished runner-up three times. The club went into liquidation in 2018 and now compete in the third-tier Fédérale league.
Elsom, who also played Super Rugby for the Waratahs and Brumbies, had been working as a coach at a school in Dublin around the time of his arrest warrant. He said in a YouTube interview four months ago 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 is 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.
