Ancienne journaliste à l'Usine Nouvelle, au Monde, et à la Tribune. Plusieurs livres: Vivendi: une affaire française; Ces messieurs de chez Lazard, Rothschild, une banque au pouvoir. Participation aux ouvrages collectifs : l'histoire secrète de la V République, l'histoire secrète du patronat , Les jours heureux, informer n'est pas un délit.
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 French government reshuffle on Tuesday saw the replacement of rebel economy and industry minister Arnaud Montebourg by Emmanuel Macron, a former banker and deputy chief-of-staff to President François Hollande. Macron, 36, who first began a career as a philosopher, is unknown to the public, but has played a crucial role as advisor to the French president on economic policies. Lénaïg Bredoux and Martine Orange profile the man in the hot seat in charge of steering France through increasingly dangerous economic waters.
Just before French government members left on their two-week summer holidays earlier this month, they met with President François Hollande for a confidential seminar in which they were presented with an alarming set of economic figures and forecasts that promise dark times when they return to work on August 18th. The deflationist spiral into which Europe is being drawn threatens to destroy all hope of France recovering growth, reducing already chronic unemployment, or of straightening its public accounts. Just as worryingly, the government appears divided and dithering over the policy direction to be adopted to avoid what some business leaders predict could become a new and catastrophic crisis by 2015. Mediapart’s economic and business affairs correspondent Martine Orange reports.
Beginning in 2013, representatives of the United States, the European Union on behalf of its 28 member states, along with more than 20 other countries have been regularly meeting in Geneva to secretly negotiate a future treaty for the liberalization of the international services market, called the Trade in Services Agreement (TISA). By far the largest single sector of this market is that of financial services, which the treaty plans to deregulate on despite all the evidence provided by the global financial crisis of the folly of such a move. The details of the treaty have until now been kept secret from public scrutiny, but for the recent revelation by WikiLeaks of the draft text of the treaty’s Financial Services Annex. To understand the full implications of the opaque dealings in Geneva, Martine Orange turned to Dominique Plihon, a former advisor to the French government on economic issues, alter-globalization militant and a professor with Paris-XIII university specialized in the financial economy.
Just a few weeks ago the chief executive of French company Alstom suggested that the group had no alternative but to sell its energy section outright to American firm General Electric. But then the economy minister Arnaud Montebourg stepped into the fray and brokered a deal, agreed last weekend, that offers considerably better prospects for one of France's flagship companies. And in doing so, says Martine Orange, the minister has not only scored a personal political victory, he has also shown that the state is not always powerless to intervene on the industrial landscape.
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.
In a dramatic move, the convicted trader Jérôme Kerviel has called on President François Hollande to offer immunity for key witnesses. These witnesses, he says, would throw a very different light on his conviction in 2010 as a “rogue trader” who lost his bank Société Générale almost 5 billion euros. Returning from a long walk to Rome, Kerviel initially said he would not set foot on French soil to start his three-year prison sentence until the president gave his response, but later crossed the border. Here Mediapart's Martine Orange makes an impassioned plea in defence of Kerviel, whom she argues has been deprived of the right of a fair and just trial to which everyone is entitled. For six years, she says, he has come up against a justice system that was blind and deaf to its own considerable shortcomings in the affair.
When the man at the helm of the French bosses' organisation calls for wage restraint and suggests paying young workers less than the legal minimum wage, it would seem reasonable to expect him to be prepared to take a dose of his own medicine. Instead Pierre Gattaz, president of the employers' association MEDEF, has just awarded himself a 29% pay rise. He is far from being the only culprit in France's corporate world. But, says Martine Orange, the symbolism bodes ill for President François Hollande's bid to cut business costs in exchange for creating jobs, a policy on which the president has staked his political future.
The fate of Alstom, one of France’s largest private-sector employees, now hangs on frantic negotiations over two rival bids for the cash-strapped French engineering group’s energy division, which represents 70% of its activities. After weeks of secret negotiations between Alstom and US conglomerate General Electric, their German competitor Siemens stepped in with its own offer at the weekend. Siemens’ bid, offering a swap of energy and transport arms, has been welcomed by the French government, with its economy minister talking up the creation of "two European and global champions in the energy and transport domains" as it faces major political embarrassment over the amputation of a giant of French industry. Mediapart's business and financial affairs correspondent Martine Orange charts the background to Alstom’s decline, and details why the social and industrial consequences for France will be serious whichever deal is accepted.
Earlier this week the French state and Chinese car maker Dongfeng agreed to take major stakes in the French car manufacturer PSA Peugeot Citroën. It marks the end of an era; from now on the Peugeot family are no longer the dominant voice in a company they have run since the days of the first steam-powered cars at the end of the 19th century. For many observers it was the inevitable outcome for a family that was torn in different directions and for a car manufacturer that had been left trailing in the slipstream of its main rivals. Martine Orange reports on how one of France's best-known families lost control of its own company.
Last month, French President François Hollande announced a programme to cut public spending by a further 50 billion euros by 2017, on top of 14 billion euros already set to be saved during 2014. Mediapart economy and finance specialist Martine Orange analyses the potentially disastrous effects that such drastic and unprecedented austerity measures may entail for both France and the rest of Europe at a time when economies across the continent are threatened by deflation.
Over the past few days, the money markets of the emerging countries have been struck by a major movement of capital withdrawals. As Martine Orange reports, the flight of capital has alarmed international monetary authorities who fear a potential destabilization of the whole of the world’s monetary system.
According to many financial experts, last year marked a turning point in which the world finally began to put the financial crisis behind it. But if 2013 was the year when stock and property markets recovered to pre-crisis levels, it was also a period when the gap between the super rich and everyone else widened to levels not seen for practically a century. In the United States, as much as half of national income went to the very rich, a concentration of wealth last seen in 1917. In Europe poverty has made a comeback, and the most disadvantaged are scrambling to feed themselves and their families. Martine Orange reports.
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En hommage à Alain Le Garrec, ancien élu PS du 1er arrondissement, mort du Covid-19. A tous les élus, militants, petites mains négligées des appareils politiques, tombés lors des élections municipales, pour que vive la démocratie.
Le 6 février, Les Echos affirmaient sur leur site que l’ex-pdg de la Société générale avait gagné son procès en diffamation contre Mediapart. C’était faux. Le quotidien a depuis changé le titre mais pas le fond. A aucun moment, il n’est dit que Mediapart a été relaxé par la 17e chambre correctionnelle. Mise au point.
Au lieu de prendre les 16 millions de dollars de récompense qui lui étaient promis, un lanceur d’alerte, ancien responsable de la Deutsche Bank, préfère y renoncer et dénoncer la collusion entre le système financier et les autorités de contrôle. Afin que toute son action ne soit pas vidée de son sens. Respect.
A quoi s’engagent les candidats aux européennes ? Alors que la campagne européenne commence, plusieurs ONG (Attac, Finance Watch, le Secours catholique, Ccfd - Terre solidaire, l’institut Verblen) ont souhaité réunir mardi 6 mai plusieurs candidats aux européennes pour les interroger sur les propositions et les combats qu’ils seraient prêts à mener, s’ils étaient élus au parlement européen.
Les dirigeants européens n’en finissaient plus de se féliciter, jeudi. La mine réjouie, tous saluaient le grand succès du retour de la Grèce sur les marchés. Athènes avait réussi à lever 3 milliards d’euros auprès d’investisseurs internationaux, avec le soutien des grandes banques internationales, dont Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan et Deutsche Bank.
