Après un passage par Capital, 20 minutes, LCP puis, plus longuement, le site arretsurimages.net, j’ai rejoint Mediapart en novembre 2012, pour m’intéresser aux entreprises au sens large.
J’ai d’abord développé une certaine obsession pour l’évasion fiscale et l’optimisation du même nom, et je me consacre désormais au monde du travail et à ses enjeux, ainsi qu’aux mobilisations sociales : prud’hommes, chômage, retraites, manifs...
Je suis le coordinateur du service économie-social de Mediapart depuis septembre 2021.
Declaration of interest
In the interest of transparency towards its readers, Mediapart’s journalists fill out and make public since 2018 a declaration of interests on the model of the one filled out by members of parliament and senior civil servants with the High Authority for Transparency and Public Life (HATVP), a body created in 2014 after Mediapart’s revelations on the Cahuzac affair.
The shootings and bombings in Paris on the evening of Friday November 13th targeted people – mainly young people – who had simply gone out to enjoy themselves. Two days after the killings Mediapart talked to pupils and students from the Paris region as they went back to school or university. Many spoke of their fear of being “in the wrong place at the wrong time” and are still struggling to make sense of the carnage. But they insist they are determined to carry on living their lives to the full. Mathilde Goanec, Dan Israel, Amélie Poinssot and Ellen Salvi report.
Morena Henriquez packs airline meals for more than 10 hours a day in a refrigerated area. Chef Rafael León has to provide his own knives and sometimes squats on the floor to prepare the in-flight meals because he has no work surface. Both earn minimal wages. These are not workers in a developing country but staff at a Los Angeles-based associate of airline giant Air France-KLM. They flew to Paris recently to confront the airline's shareholders over their miserable working conditions. And now its management has finally agreed to intervene on their behalf with its American partner. Dan Israel reports on the fight against working conditions that one French trade union official has described as “modern-day slavery”.
Their stores account for 10% of French households' spending every year and their group owns popular retail and commercial names in France such as Auchan supermarkets, Leroy Merlin DIY stores, Flunch restaurants, Norauto car accessory outlets, Décathlon sports shops and Kiabi clothing stores. The group also runs hugely lucrative operations in Russia, China and other countries. But the people who own it, the Mulliez family, are virtually unknown in France, and shun all press coverage and publicity. Now, against the wishes of the head of the secretive Mulliez dynasty, a book has been published charting how 650 descendants of the group’s founders today preside over a rich and powerful global retail empire. Dan Israel reports.
The massacre of 11 people at the offices of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo earlier this month, in a series of terrorist attacks that also saw the murders of four Jewish hostages in a Paris kosher store and the executions of two police officers, has brought worldwide attention to a publication hitherto little-known outside of France. But the history of the magazine and its outstanding cartoonists remains obscure to many in the Anglophone world. Dan Israel presents here (cartoons included) the five-decade, two-generation story of an eclectic gang of irreverent, anarchic and unapologetic artists who made up the cream of post-war French cartoonists, and questions what will be their legacy.
The attack by gunmen on the offices of Charlie Hebdo on Wednesday came almost nine years after the French satirical magazine found itself at the centre of a fierce controversy for first reproducing in France the so-called ‘Prophet Muhammad caricatures’ originally published in a Danish newspaper. Charlie Hebdo has since continued to publish cartoons that mock Islamic fundamentalism, prompting the anger of a section of Muslims in France and abroad, and which led to a devastating firebomb attack on its offices in 2011. The magazine has regularly defended its position as that of a satirical publication that is equally irreverent towards the hypocrisies of all religions. Dan Israel traces the bitter background to Wednesday’s horrific outrage.
To support France's ultimately successful bid to host the Euro 2016 football tournament, ministers back in 2010 promised that the event's governing body UEFA would be exempt from all taxes on its profits. The current government decided to honour that pledge and enshrine it in budget legislation. But though the proposal met with opposition from many MPs in the National Assembly ministers then went even further and extended the exemption to other sports too. The result, reports Dan Israel, is that France has just become a tax haven for international sporting competitions.
The general secretary of France's leading trade union, the Confédération générale du travail (CGT), could soon be forced out of his job after an embarrassing series of revelations about expensive renovations to his flat and office and a hefty lump sum payment. Many observers believe that despite last-ditch attempts to save his position Thierry Lepaon, who was seen a compromise candidate when he took over the reins of power at the union in March 2013, will soon have to stand down amid growing anger among rank-and-file members following the media disclosures. As Dan Israel reports, Lepaon's rapid fall from grace is a sign of a deeper malaise inside what is still the country's most powerful trade union.
The Paris Court of Appeal this week upheld a decision that Swiss bank UBS must post bail of 1.1 billion euros while a judicial investigation into its alleged role in massive, organised tax evasion continues. The colossal bail sum, the highest ever demanded in France, was ordered this summer by magistrates leading the probe into Switzerland’s largest bank which, if sent for trial, faces a far greater fine. Mediapart has gained access to the confidential magistrates’ judicial order in July, in which they detail their investigations and justify the bail. Dan Israel reports.
The French government’s environment and energy minister Ségolène Royal has just unveiled her plans for what is known as “energy transition” - the move to a society which uses less energy and which switches from fossil and nuclear fuel to renewables. This long-awaited new law, which will be debated by the French Parliament in the autumn, has been touted as one of the flagship measures of President François Hollande's five-year term of office. But as Mediapart's environment correspondent Jade Lindgaard and Dan Israel report, the proposals, while regarded as a step in the right direction, have been widely described as timid and lacking in ambition.
The former Luxembourg prime minister has just been voted by Europe's mainstream right-wing parties to be their lead candidate ahead of May's European elections. Under new EU rules now in place this means the veteran politician could well become the president of the European Commission later this year. But for many observers Jean-Claude Juncker is indelibly linked to a dated vision of Europe that belongs to the last century. And as Dan Israel and Ludovic Lamant report, he is also closely identified with the financial secrecy of his native country.
France's women’s rights minister Najat Vallaud-Belkacem this week revealed that some 500 companies were recently ordered to introduce gender parity at the workplace or pay hefty fines until they do. For despite legal requirements for firms to provide what the minister called ‘professional equality’ between male and female employees, women in France on average earn markedly less than men and are significantly less present in managerial posts. Dan Israel presents some of the stark facts of an outrageous discrimination, and hears from outspoken feminist and businesswoman Mercedes Erra why she believes change can only come about by imposing quotas.
French economist Gabriel Zucman is carving a reputation as one of the leading specialists on the growing business of organized tax evasion and the cost of tax havens to the public purse. Zucman, an assistant professor with the London School of Economics and a visiting scholar with the University of California, Berkeley, has just completed his latest study of this gigantic worldwide fraud, published in France under the title ‘La Richesse cachée des nations - Enquête sur les paradis fiscaux’ (The hidden wealth of nations -an investigation into tax havens). In this interview with Dan Israel, he presents his calculations of the staggering amounts of assets secretly stashed in tax havens across the globe, and offers his own proposals for tackling the problem.
