French ministers lay bare their financial and property interests

ItIt is a small revolution, but a revolution nonetheless. On Friday June 27th, the new Haute Autorité pour la Transparence de la Vie Publique (HATVP) or High Authority on Transparency in Public Life, published details of the property assets and financial interests of the members of the French government. Top of the 'wealth' list (see below) is foreign minister Laurent Fabius with assets of more than 5 million euros, while at the other end of the spectrum is Europe minister and former first secretary of the Socialist Party Harlém Désir, who owns no property and whose total assets come to just over 35,000 euros.

Since 2011, under prime minister François Fillon, ministers have been obliged to declare their financial interests, and since 2013, under the premiership of Jean-Marc Ayrault, they have been forced to publish their property assets. But this time not only are the two items being published together in detail, the financial interest and property declarations have also been examined in advance by officials at the HATVP. This body was set up by parliament in the wake of the scandal involving former budget minister Jérôme Cahuzac in order to clean up public life in France, in particular in relation to MPs, senators and ministers and their financial interests. This new body has real powers, including the ability to work closely with the tax authorities.
HATVP's president Jean-Louis Nadal, a former senior judge nominated by President François Hollande, said in an interview with Le Monde on Friday June 27th that in recent months they have “established a privileged partnership” with the French tax authorities. Around ten civil servants with legal and tax backgrounds have been seconded to work with the HATVP to ensure that there is a mixture of professional cultures in the new organisation. The former body in charge of overseeing public financial ethics, the Commission pour la transparence de la vie financière, which was closed down at the end of 2013 and which had no investigative powers, was nicknamed the “commission of the deaf mutes”. In contrast the HATVP will be able to request administrative cooperation from abroad, for example to check the ownership of a bank account or a property in another country.

Explanation of graphic: The top table shows the ministers' total financial assets, including property (minus outstanding loans), stocks and shares, savings (apart from current accounts) and various fixed or tangible assets (furniture and art for example).
Note that ministers may own their properties jointly with others or in their own right.
The second table shows the monetary value of the property owned by ministers.
Three ministers have declared that they do not own property: Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, Axelle Lemaire and Harlem Désir.

But over and above the publication of ministers' property assets – those of MP's will be available for public inspection in the autumn – the new element is in the publishing of financial interests which spell out not only the ministers' work activities for the last five years, but also the pay they received. The financial interests of MPs and senators will be published by the end of July.
Under the new arrangements, if the HATVP spots a potential conflict of interest it will be able to send “recommendations” or “orders” to members of the government – or officials in their offices – to stop them from acting in a way that creates confusion between the public interest and their own private interest. Indeed, the authority used this power in May in relation to an advisor in the ministry of justice who had remained a practising lawyer appearing before the Conseil d'État, the country’s top administrative court. The official later resigned.

Explanation of graphic: This shows the type of jobs held by ministers over the last five years.
Twenty-seven out of the 30 ministers have held one or more positions as an elected representative.
The other jobs and professions carried out by ministers in that period:
1 lawyer, 2 teachers, 1 doctor, 2 authors, 3 advisors, 1 parliamentary assistant, 1 advisor at the public accounts watchdog the Cour des Comptes.
Note: the same person could have worked in several different areas of activity.
The publicity given to the ministers' declarations, and the relative transparency in relation to parliamentarians, whose property assets will be on lists made available in the offices of regional prefects, should above all help citizens to scrutinise the activities of their representatives. Members of the public will be able to pass relevant information about ministers' and MPs' interests to the HATVP, though this power is slightly undermined in some areas, for example knowing who is on the board of a company is not easy because of the lack of a register of directors. “The first benefit of transparency is beign able to dissipate rumours and myths,” says HATVP boss Jean-Louis Nadal.
Nonetheless, the declaration process does have a few weak points. For example, it is not clear if the earnings declared are gross or net. And the declarations of interest are singularly lacking in detail, to the point where in some cases they lack serious value.

For example, the minister for relations with parliament Jean-Marie Le Guen, who had undervalued his property portfolio by around 700,000 euros, gives the pay he received (see below) as an elected representative at the time he was named a minister (in April 2014). The sum he provides of “25,584 euros/year 2012” corresponds to his positions as “MP for Paris” and “Paris councillor and assistant mayor in Paris”. What does this amount mean? It cannot refer to an annual income for those positions, as it is too small for that, yet it seems too high to be a monthly figure. Why are the figures not spelled out in detail, and why is there no income for 2013?

Another example is culture minister Aurélie Filippetti, first appointed in May 2012 and who was kept in her post in this year’s reshuffle. In her declaration of interests Filippetti does not even state how much she earns as a minister. We learn that she earned 45,000 euros a year as an MP, in other words up to May 2012 when she became a minister. We discover, too, that since September 2012 she has been earning 1,850 euros a month as a councillor on the département council – a département is roughly equivalent to a county – of Moselle in the north-east of France. But how much was she earning in March 2014, just before she was renamed as culture minister? We do not know.
Among the new members of prime minister Manuel Valls's government is Thierry Braillard, junior sports minister since April 2014. A lawyer by profession, his declaration (see below) shows that he has been earning less and less money over recent years. From earning 6,000 euros a month five years ago Braillard's income went down to 3,000 a month in June 2012 then to 2,000 euros a month in January 2014.

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• The French version of this article can be found here.

English version by Michael Streeter