The revelation quickly became headline news across the French media. Le Parisien newspaper revealed in its Thursday edition that the examining magistrate investigating the complex Bettencourt affair was perhaps guilty of a conflict of interest. The report said that Judge Jean-Michel Gentil had used a personal friend as one of the medical experts who pronounced on ageing L'Oréal heiress Liliane Bettencourt's mental health in June 2011.
The medical experts' finding that Bettencourt, now aged 90, was suffering from “mixed dementia” and “a moderately severe stage [sic] of Alzheimer’s disease”and that the “slow degenerative cerebral process” began in 2007 was a key stage in the affair. Subsequently, individuals would face allegations that they had exploited the mental frailty of the heiress, most notably former president Nicolas Sarkozy who was placed under formal investigation in March this year on the basis of “grave or concordant” evidence that he “abused” Bettencourt’s diminished mental faculties. The Right reacted furiously to the news, which they claimed was a political rather than a judicial act.
So when Le Parisien revealed that one of the medical experts Sophie Gromb, the head of the medical expert witness unit at the Bordeaux CHU teaching hospital, had been a witness at Gentil's marriage on June 30th 2007, the reaction was perhaps predictable.
Lawyers representing Sarkozy and others facing investigation in the affair - 15 lawyers in all – quickly issued a joint press release in which they seized on the “very close and long-standing links” between the judge and the expert. By chance – though some may not find it coincidental – the lawyers will be appearing before appeal court judges in Bordeaux on Thursday 6th June seeking to have the formal investigations against their clients overturned.
In their statement the lawyers noted that: “The links are even more worrying given that a request to exceed the [usual expert] fees was made by Madame Sophie Gromb on August 19th 2011 and agreed by judge Jean-Michel Gentil alone on 24th August 2011. The defence recalls that at 8am on June 7th 2011 the judge Jean-Michel Gentil gained admittance to Madame Liliane Bettencourt's home, accompanied by Madame Sophie Gromb who spoke alone for 35 minutes with Madame Liliane Bettencourt who was confined to her bed.”
They concluded: “These facts show a clear conflict of interest which throws suspicion on the impartiality of the expert opinion on which the process of preparing a case is based. It is now down to the prosecutor on behalf of the Bordeaux regional court to draw the consequences of these infringements of the rights of the defence and of the right to fair proceedings, which have impeded the revealing of the truth.” There has since been speculation that Gentil might be removed from the case as a result of the revelations.
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However, despite attempts by the defence to use the story to help their clients' cause and the widespread media coverage the issue has caused, there seems little reason to think it will have any impact on the Bettencourt investigation, which has now been completed. Someone close to the case told Mediapart: “The medical report reflected the work of five medical experts and not just one. In fact, other doctors had already made similar diagnoses and many witnesses have confirmed Liliane Bettencourt's state of weakness.” In other words, the claim that the friendship between the judge and the expert may have impacted on the conduct of the case should quickly go away.
Another key point is that Judge Jean-Michel Gentil is only one of three examining magistrates at Bordeaux who have been working on the Bettencourt affair. The other two are Cécile Ramonatxo and Valérie Noël. Valérie Noël has said on France 2 and elsewhere that all three judges were involved in the decision about which medical experts to use. While admitting she was not aware that judge Gentil knew the medical expert in question, she added: “That would in any case have had absolutely no influence on the nomination of Sophie Gromb, because it was an obvious choice. This doctor is an expert who, in Bordeaux, is an authority. It was legitimate for us to think of her!”
That is not to say that Jean-Michel Gentil should not perhaps have been a little more careful. An experienced examining magistrate spoken to by Mediapart says investigating judges have to be very cautious in the way they operate. “Experts often seek to become pals with us, but we have to remember that they are paid with public money. When you're an examining magistrate you can't take the risk of choosing friends.”
'Destabilising the judge'
Nonetheless the disclosure of Gentil's links with the medical expert at this time and the predictable furore it has caused suggests it falls neatly into a familiar pattern of attacks that take place on examining magistrates when they tackle the powerful and well-connected. Gentil has already received anonymous letters and death threats, which are par for the course in such sensitive cases. But he has also been wrongly accused by one of the defence lawyers of confusing 'Bettencourt' with 'Betancourt' – Ingrid Betancourt is a French-Colombian politician who was held hostage in the South American country for six-and-a-half years – and castigated for having written a supposedly “political article” for Le Monde on 27th June 2012.
After Sarkozy was put under formal investigation by Gentil in the Bettencourt affair he is said to have threatened that the matter would “not rest there” while UMP MP and former Sarkozy adviser Henri Guaino claimed that Gentil had “dishonoured the justice system”.
Fellow judge Valérie Noël herself seems to suggest that there is a campaign being waged over the Bettencourt affair, noting that “once again we're entering the domain of destabilisation”. And speaking on RTL radio she said she was “dismayed” by suggestions that any of the judges were biased against the former president. “No one here wants to have a go at Nicolas Sarkozy, it's absurd,” she said. “Since the start of the case we have kept our course. If some lawyers, politicians or journalists think that we are wrong or that we're biased, it's up to them; it's the courts who will decide.”
Such attempts to unsettle or “destabilise” judges involved in sensitive financial and political investigations have a long history. For example, when the examining magistrate Eric Halphen was investigating the hidden finances of Jacques Chirac's old centre-right Rassemblement pour la République (RPR) party – one of the predecessors of the current UMP - in the 1990s he was inundated with messages from an anonymous poison-pen letter writer. He was later spied on as far away as a beach in the Antilles in the Caribbean, then became the object of a bizarre trap set by police officers in 1994 which saw him removed from a sensitive case because of something his father-in-law was alleged to have done. That scandal became known as the Schuller-Maréchal affair.
In 2000 the judge Isabelle Prévost-Desprez was curiously denounced to the Ministry of Justice by a police superintendent at the then counter-terrorism unit the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (DST), just as she was investigating alleged fraud at the bank Rivaud. A decade later, she would again be the public target of criticism, this time in relation to the Bettencourt affair.
The higher the stakes, the more violent the attacks. Today the judge who is most subject to such “judge hunting” is Jean-Michel Gentil, held responsible for daring to put Nicolas Sarkozy under formal investigation in the Bettencourt affair.
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English version by Michael Streeter