Fabrice Arfi

All his articles

• How the Bongo's holding company preys on the Gabonese economy

  International — Investigation

  

  Mediapart has gained access to confidential documents that reveal how a handful of Gabon’s ruling Bongo clan, and Gabonese President Ali Bongo in particular, prey on almost every sector of the country’s economy via a holding company called Delta Synergie. The company, established under the late dictator Omar Bongo, has stakes in the insurance, banking and property sectors, the agroalimentary and construction industries, agriculture and raw materials, gas and oil production, wood processing, business aviation, the transport and medical sectors, and the security business. The scandal comes on top of revelations of the vast wealth, including offshore bank accounts, that Ali Bongo and his sister Pascaline have inherited from their father, and while the West African country, where a third of the population live in poverty, is gripped by a wave of strikes and protests over poor living standards. Fabrice Arfi reports.

  18 March 2015

  by Fabrice Arfi

  Free access

• Top Sarkozy aide faces probe over Libyan election funding claims

  France

  

  In a dramatic development Claude Guéant, ex-chief of staff to President Nicolas Sarkozy and a former interior minister, has been placed under formal investigation for “laundering of the proceeds of tax fraud as part of an organised gang”, “forgery” and “use of false instruments” in connection with the probe into claims that the late Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi illegally funded Sarkozy's successful 2007 presidential election campaign. Investigators want to know the origin of more than 500,000 euros that was transferred into his bank account in 2008 and part of which he later used to buy a flat in Paris. Experts in the art world have cast doubt on Guéant's explanation that the money came from the sale of two paintings by 17th century Dutch artist Andries Van Eertvelt.

  7 March 2015

  by Fabrice Arfi and Karl Laske

  Free access

• The 'ill-gotten gains' French police found in Congo ruling clan's penthouse

  International

  

  In 2010, a French judicial investigation was opened into evidence that several African leaders and their families hold vast assets in France gained from embezzlement of the public funds of their countries. Among those targeted by the investigation, which was triggered by anti-corruption NGOs, is Republic of Congo President Denis Sassou Nguesso, head of what the World Bank classifies as one of the world’s ‘Heavily-Indebted Poor Countries’, where a quarter of children aged under five suffer from malnutrition. Mediapart has learnt of the details of a police raid on a luxury property close to Paris belonging to Nguesso’s nephew Edgard, where they found vast sums of cash, jewellery and watches and evidence that the multi-million-euro apartment is funded by an offshore company whose accounts are fed by the Congolese treasury. Fabrice Arfi reports.

  12 February 2015

  by Fabrice Arfi

  Free access

• How the Paris terrorists slipped off intelligence radar

  France — Investigation

  

  The two brothers who last week carried out the shooting attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo magazine were the object of separate surveillance operations by French intelligence services between 2011 and 2014, which was halted last summer after it apparently failed to uncover evidence that they were involved in terrorist activity, Mediapart can reveal. Meanwhile, the third terrorist, Amedy Coulibaly, who killed five people during the Paris terror attacks last week, fell completely off the radar of anti-terrorist services after his release in March last year from prison where he had been serving time for his involvement in a plot to free a convicted terrorist from jail. Fabrice Arfi reports.

  13 January 2015

  by Fabrice Arfi

  Free access

• Charlie Hebdo killings: did intelligence services overlook threat from terror network?

  France — Investigation

  

  The murder of a policewoman and the bloody siege at a Jewish supermarket carried out by a known associate of the two suspects in the Charlie Hebdo massacre indicates that an organised group was behind last week's terror attacks. Mediapart has had access to documents from an anti-terrorist investigation in 2010  showing that two of last week's gunmen were involved back then with a radicalised French network that was considering future “martyr operations”. These were supermarket hostage taker Amedy Coulibaly and Charlie Hebdo massacre suspect Chérif Kouachi. As Fabrice Arfi and Karl Laske report, the revelations will inevitably raise questions about whether more could have been done by the intelligence services to prevent last week's bloody events.

  10 January 2015

  by Fabrice Arfi and Karl Laske

  Free access

• Graphologists confirm Gaddafi-Sarkozy illegal funding document is genuine

  International — Investigation

  

  Graphology experts assigned by a French judicial investigation to determine the authenticity of the signature on a document published by Mediapart detailing the Gaddafi regime’s approval of payment of 50 million euros to back Nicolas Sarkozy's 2007 presidential election campaign have unanimously concluded that it is indeed that of Moussa Koussa, head of the Libyan foreign intelligence services and later the dictator’s foreign affairs minister. The finding is a crucial new development in the investigation which has now gathered testimony from numerous experts backing the authenticity of the document. Fabrice Arfi and Karl Laske report.

  14 November 2014

  by Fabrice Arfi and Karl Laske

  Free access

• When Sarkozy met Gaddafi: how the Libyan election funding saga began

  France — Investigation

  

  The story of the covert Libyan funding of Nicolas Sarkozy's 2007 election campaign started two years earlier with a meeting between Colonel Muammar Gaddafi and the then presidential hopeful Sarkozy himself, Mediapart can reveal. According to arms dealer Ziad Takieddine, who was in Tripoli at the time, Sarkozy directly asked Gaddafi for financial help during an official visit to the North African country in October 2005. A short time later Sarkozy's close political friend and ally Brice Hortefeux made a visit to Tripoli in which he had an off-diary meeting with Gadaffi's security chief Abdullah Senussi, a key figure in the corruption allegations involving Libya and France. Judges investigating the Libyan funding of Sarkozy's campaign are now painstakingly piecing together the background to the affair. Fabrice Arfi and Karl Laske report.

  3 October 2014

  by Fabrice Arfi and Karl Laske

  Free access

• Gaddafi funding of Sarkozy campaign: the expert testimony that backs Mediapart evidence

  International — Investigation

  

  In April 2012, Mediapart published an official Libyan document that revealed that the regime of the late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi approved payment of 50 million euros to fund Nicolas Sarkozy's successful 2007 presidential election campaign. The publication of the document prompted the opening of a judicial investigation into the claims that Gaddafi illegally financed Sarkozy’s campaign, and the ongoing probe represents a major threat to the former president who this month announced his return to active politics. “About Libya, the judges know that the documents are false,” said Sarkozy in an interview published last weekend. But in fact, as Fabrice Arfi and Karl Laske report, the magistrates leading the investigation have collected statements from numerous experts whose testimony gives credence to the document published by Mediapart.

  27 September 2014

  by Fabrice Arfi and Karl Laske

  Free access

• French minister: 'Why I banned Gaza protests'

  France — Interview

  

  In an interview with Mediapart the French interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve has justified his controversial decision to ban a number of planned protests over the Israeli war against Gaza. In doing so Cazeneuve insisted that it was his decision to ban those demonstrations, and not that of the president François Hollande or prime minister Manuel Valls. The interior minister insisted his ministry had “concrete evidence” that synagogues and Jewish businesses were going to be singled out in those protests. During the interview Cazeneuve also said he had often joined marches in the Palestinian cause in the past and “would have done so again” had he not been in office. Fabrice Arfi, Louise Fessard and Mediapart's editor-in-chief Edwy Plenel report.

  15 August 2014

  by Fabrice Arfi, Louise Fessard and Edwy Plenel

  Free access

• French Right reeling over secret loan and Sarkozy election campaign fraud

  France — Investigation

  The head of the parliamentary group of France’s main opposition party, the conservative UMP, faces a stormy meeting with his MP colleagues on Tuesday after Mediapart’s revelations that, without informing them, he secretly lent their cash-strapped party 3 million euros from what are largely public funds destined for financing the group’s parliamentary activities.  The scandal has outraged many within the UMP, and follows Mediapart’s earlier revelations that the party used faked invoices to hide 17 million euros of illegal overspending on the 2012 presidential election campaign of its candidate, Nicolas Sarkozy. Fabrice Arfi, Mathilde Mathieu and Ellen Salvi report.

  23 June 2014

  by Fabrice Arfi, Mathilde Mathieu and Ellen Salvi

  Free access

• Former top French government aides sent for trial in arms kickbacks scam

  International

  

  At the end of an investigation that has lasted more than three years, six people, including a former minister and the current managing director of luxury goods firm LVMH, have been sent for trial for their alleged roles in a gigantic political funding scam that centred on secret cash kickbacks from French weapons sales abroad.  The case, one the biggest political corruption scandals to have emerged in France in recent decades, yet threatens to engulf the political masters of those accused - former French prime minister Édouard Balladur, his defence minister François Léotard, and Balladur’s budget minister, later French president, Nicolas Sarkozy. Fabrice Arfi reports.       

  12 June 2014

  by Fabrice Arfi

  Free access

• The element of corruption that lurks behind the deal between Alstom and GE

  International

  

  The long-running saga of negotiations over General Electric’s 16.9 billion-dollar bid for the energy arm of French engineering group Alstom continued this week when GE’s chief executive Jeff Immelt met for further negotiations with French President François Hollande. GE is engaged in a poker match with the French government which has made no secret of its preference for a mooted counter-bid from German firm Siemens, despite the Alstom board’s choice to do a deal with the US giant. But hidden behind all the talk of decisions of industrial strategy, synergy and job guarantees, a quite separate consideration appears to help explain both the rapidity and secrecy of the deal first agreed between between Alstom and GE on April 23rd, the day when a former senior Alstom executive was arrested in the US Virgin Islands on corruption charges. Fabrice Arfi and Martine Orange report.

  29 May 2014

  by Fabrice Arfi and Martine Orange

  Free access