It marked the end of a grim week for the French government in general and François Hollande in particular. After less than two weeks as a member of the new government, it was announced late on Thursday afternoon that overseas trade minister Thomas Thévenoud was resigning from his post. A statement issued on behalf of prime minister Manuel Valls said that the decision for Thévenoud to step down “followed a situation discovered after his nomination” which meant that the minister “was not able to continue in his post”.
The president’s office hurriedly emphasised that his departure was not due to any political disagreement, and said the resignation was for “personal” issues. Instead it emerged that the resignation was related to tax issues or, as the prime minister's office put it in a curious turn of phrase, a problem of “tax conformity”.
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Mediapart understands that Thévenoud, who only became an MP in June 2012, has not declared his taxable earnings for several years; the former minister himself now admits he has been late declaring his earnings for the last years from 2012. Mediapart has also been told that in order to get the money they were owed by the politician the tax authorities took steps to withdraw the cash directly from his salary as an MP via the National Assembly. In all they recovered around 10,000 euros.
In an interview with his local newspaper, the Journal de Saône-et-Loire, published on Friday evening, Thomas Thévenoud admitted he had been late with his tax declaration for three successive years, and that for 2013 alone he had been forced to pay 12,593 euros in penalties. However, he strongly denied ever having made a false declaration or having hidden any assets, saying he was not a “fraudster” but a “careless taxpayer”. He told the paper: “You can accuse me of carelessness – that's legitimate and believe me I'm the first to do so – but not of dishonesty.” The MP blamed his “carelessness” on the pressure of work as he took on more responsibilities as a politician. Thomas Thévenoud added: “Fundamentally, my rigour in my public life was matched only by my carelessness in managing private affairs. I'm paying the political price for it today, and that's only natural.”
The question remains, however, of when precisely Thomas Thévenoud “regularised” his tax issues. Mediapart was alerted to the fact that there were problems with the MP's tax declarations at the end of July, but was not in a position to write with any detail the exact nature of the problems. Did Thomas Thévenoud wait until his appointment before paying the tax he owed? Did he, in that case, enter the government concealing a tax hand grenade that was waiting to go off, running the risk of further destabilising the administration and ruling Socialist Party? According to his interview with his local paper, the former minister says he only paid his back taxes for 2013 and resulting penalties - a total of 41,475 euros - on September 1st, 2014. In other words, after he had already been made a minister.
Thomas Thévenoud had been a surprise nomination to the second Valls government on August 26th. The MP for the Saône-et-Loire in eastern France had at one time been quite close politically to Arnaud Montebourg, the turbulent minister for the economy whose removal from government was the main reason for the reshuffle. Yet at the age of 40, Thomas Thévenoud, who was a spokesman for the Socialist Party group in the National Assembly, was seen as a rising star.
And, ironically given Thursday's events, before becoming a minister the MP had also been a champion of the attempt to tackle evasion that was launched after the so-called Cahuzac affair. That involved the then budget minister Jérôme Cahuzac who was eventually force to resign after Mediapart revealed he had an undeclared Swiss bank account. In particular Thévenoud had been vice-president of a parliamentary group overseeing the tax authorities' attempts to crack down on tax fraud in France. Last October, talking about demands sent by the tax office urging potential fraudsters to set their affairs in order, the MP warned offenders: “Put you tax affairs in order because the countdown is about to start.”
Even more embarrassingly, Thévenoud had been vice-president of the parliamentary committee of inquiry into the Cahuzac affair itself. During one committee hearing the MP said: “I have a very simple question to ask [Cahuzac]: “Why did he lie to political representatives? And why did he lie to himself?” Thévenoud then added: “It's a real betrayal.”
On Friday, the day after Thomas Thévenoud's abrupt departure, his socialist colleagues at the National Assembly were still astounded by the news. “How can one 'forget' to declare one's taxes?” more than one MP asked. Just last weekend, however, the new minister had been busy recruiting officials for his private office at the foreign ministry. “I have to say that his thought processes escape me...” admitted one of his friends.
The new education minister Najat Vallaud-Belkacem admitted the affair was “very bad news” and a “bitter blow”. She added: “It fuels the mistrust towards political leaders.” The minister also conceded that it was “legitimate” to ask whether Thomas Thévenoud should now remain as an MP.
The government was hit by another financial affair in June when the minister in charge of relations with Parliament, Jean-Marie Le Guen, was criticised by the government’s transparency watchdog, the HATVP, for undervaluing the value of his property by up to 700,000 euros in the first public declaration of ministers' wealth. However, he remains in office.
Thomas Thévenoud's enforced resignation could hardly have happened at a worst time, coming as it did at the end of a terrible week for President François Hollande. The president was said to have been “devastated” by a book published on Thursday by his former companion Valérie Trierweiler. In 'Merci pour ce moment' ('Thank you for this moment'), which had been printed in total secrecy in Germany, the former First Lady gives a detailed account of their relationship, which ended in January after reports of the president’s relationship with actress Julie Gayet, and paints an unflattering portrait of Hollande as a man. Potentially most damaging is the claim that Hollande is privately scornful of the poor, allegedly referring to them as the “toothless ones”.
Meanwhile opinion polls published this week show that President Hollande's already low ratings have plummeted even further. A survey by pollsters TNS-Sofres gives the president an approval rating of just 13%, the lowest score the institution has ever recorded for an incumbent president. Even Manuel Valls, whose promotion to the position of prime minister was supposed to help boost the popularity of President Hollande, has seen his ratings tumble. In August his approval rating was 30%, down by 14% in just two months.
Thévenoud has been replaced as minister in charge of overseas trade, tourism and French citizens living abroad by another young MP, Matthias Fekl. Ironically, in an interview with Mediapart published just last Saturday, Fekl had been critical of the government's “social-liberalism”. While noting that the government was “coherent” and followed a clear line Fekl said: “We must not give the impression that we are putting in place that which [former president] Nicolas Sarkozy had not done.”
Meanwhile, government allies have sought to depict the swift departure of Thomas Thévenoud as proof that the measures brought in by this administration to clean up public life – notably the creation of the transparency watchdog the HATVP – are working. A spokesman for the Socialist Party Olivier Faure told RMC radio that the resignation shows that “the rules apply to all members of the government”. He described the increased transparency seen under this administration as “a major democratic advance”.
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- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter
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