48 ans. À la création de Mediapart, j'ai d’abord suivi le Parlement, puis j’ai rejoint le service Enquêtes. Mes sujets de prédilection pendant des années : l'argent des élus et des partis, la corruption, la transparence, les conflits d'intérêts... De 2018 à 2019, je me suis consacrée à des sujets sur les migrations. Puis j’ai intégré la direction éditoriale élargie, de 2019 à 2023, comme responsable du pôle Société. Désormais, je me penche sur les droits des enfants et les violences qui leur sont faites.
Pour m’écrire : mathilde.mathieu@mediapart.fr
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.
French foreign minister Laurent Fabius is the country’s longest-serving socialist politician in government, having previously headed four ministries and becoming, in 1984, France’s youngest ever prime minister at the age of 37. Elected president of the National Assembly, the lower house, on two occasions, he has served as head of the Socialist Party and remains one of its leading officials in a career that spans 40 years. During that period, he has built up a powerful political base in the Seine-Maritime département (county) in northern France, where he has also held numerous local posts, as a Member of Parliament, mayor and councillor. In the run-up to this weekend’s Socialist Party congress in Poitiers, Stéphane Alliès and Mathilde Mathieu have investigated the workings of Fabius’s fiefdom, interviewing local party officials past and present, and uncovered disturbing evidence of a lucrative ‘jobs for the boys’ system of rewards for loyalty. Here they report on how Didier Marie, one of the foreign minister’s faithful local circle of allies, was able to earn 12,000 euros per month over several years from a catalogue of jobs that would, to all appearances, test even the most ardent workaholic.
The Franco-Canadian group Orpea, which runs private retirement homes and health clinics, has been using “observers” to spy on its workforce and in particular trade union activities, according to documents seen by Mediapart. When the French trade union in question, the CGT, decided to make a formal legal complaint, the group offered it a deal worth four million euros in return for withdrawing the complaint and keeping quiet about the snooping – a deal the union ultimately refused. Mediapart can also reveal that the three “spies” used by the healthcare firm came from a company which is linked to allegations that furniture retailer Ikea spied on its staff and customers in France. Mathilde Goanec and Mathilde Mathieu report.
In the French Senate, it appears that crossing a courtyard can be a lucrative affair. Mediapart has learnt how the secretary general of the upper house’s conservative UMP party group of senators was given 173,000 euros, paid out of publicly-provided funds, as an indemnity payment for losing his job, and just weeks before taking up another post with the Senate’s president, UMP party member Gérard Larcher. Mathilde Mathieu reports on the latest example of the gravy-train lifestyle enjoyed at the Senate, whose UMP party group is at the centre of an ongoing judicial investigation into suspected money laundering and misuse of public funds.
It took three years, but Mediapart has finally been vindicated in its fight for full transparency when it comes to scrutinising the campaign accounts of French elections. The highest administrative court in the land, the Conseil d'État, has ruled in favour of Mediapart's demand that the entire process of how election accounts are checked by the official body in charge – the CNCCFP - should be open to the public. The ruling means that whatever the election and whoever the candidate the public has a right to know the full details. Mathilde Mathieu reports on this landmark verdict.
Former French presidents are provided for life with a system of privileges that are estimated to cost the French taxpayer between 1.5 and 2 million euros per former president per year. In the case of Nicolas Sarkozy, elected last year as head of the conservative UMP party ahead of his expected bid to regain the presidential office, the taxpayer funds, among other perks, his central-Paris offices and staff which cost, respectively, 215,392 euros and 663,000 euros per year. Mediapart publishes here the detailed costs of Sarkozy’s startling privileges paid by the public purse, never previously revealed. They raise serious questions over the dividing line for the use of the funds, between the personal and political activities of former president, who meanwhile argues for drastic reductions in public spending and the reform of social benefits paid to the worse-off. Mathilde Mathieu reports.
An official French watchdog that monitors the financial probity of holders of public office has alerted the Paris public prosecutor’s office to its “serious doubt” that a French Senator and two members of the National Assembly, the lower house, deliberately under-declared their assets to parliament “notably due to the omission” of their secret bank accounts in Switzerland. The cases of Senator Bruno Sido and MPs Lucien Degauchy and Bernard Brochand, all from the conservative opposition UMP party, emerge just one year after the socialist government’s budget minister Jérôme Cahuzac was forced to resign following Mediapart’s revelations of his secret account with Swiss bank UBS, and months after a junior minister was found to have avoided paying income tax for several years. Mathilde Mathieu reports.
In recent days six people have been placed under formal investigation in connection with the presidential election financial scandal that is rocking the main right-wing opposition party, the UMP. Judges are investigating a system of fake invoicing by communications firm Bygmalion in 2012 in which they unlawfully billed the UMP rather than Nicolas Sarkozy's election team for work they did organising campaign rallies. This was apparently done to avoid the Sarkozy campaign breaching strict rules on how much presidential candidates can spend. This growing scandal is now potentially a major threat to Sarkozy's political comeback, though the former president himself claims he knew nothing of the affair or even the name Bygmalion at the time. Here Mathilde Mathieu, Ellen Salvi and Marine Turchi give a guide to the main players in the so-called Bygmalion affair and the issues at stake.
After less than a fortnight in his new job, France's overseas trade minister Thomas Thévenoud has dramatically and abruptly quit over problems with his tax returns. According to Mediapart's sources, the new minister had not filled in his tax returns for several years. In a statement Thévenoud admitted to “delays” in his declaration and payment of tax owed, though stressed that the matter has now been sorted out. Nonetheless the sudden loss of another minister in this manner will come as a blow to the new government formed by prime minister Manuel Valls on August 26th, which saw the enforced departure of heavyweight economy minister Arnaud Montebourg. It also comes against a backdrop of poor economic results and plummeting opinion polls for Valls and, above all, President François Hollande. Mathilde Mathieu and Lénaïg Bredoux report.
French MPs have recently been obliged to make public not just their financial interests but also who they hire to work for them. According to these official declarations and Mediapart's own research at least a fifth of all elected members of the National Assembly have employed a family member in 2014. Of these, 52 were spouses, 32 were daughters and 28 were sons. Mathilde Mathieu reports on the domestic world of French parliamentarians.
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.
Three weeks after François Hollande's powerful advisor Aquilino Morelle was forced to quit the Elysée following Mediapart's allegations of a conflict of interest, the president is once more caught up in the affair. The leading trade union at the elite public watchdog where Morelle worked while also consulting for the pharmaceutical industry is frustrated at the lack of action from the state and has called on President Hollande to intervene and order a full official investigation. Some of the watchdog’s officials feel they need an inquiry to show they are above suspicion and “transparent” as an organisation. “Our credibility is at stake,” one inspector told Mediapart. Mathilde Mathieu and Michaël Hajdenberg report.
Amid the continuing woes of French President François Hollande, dubbed by opinion poll results as France’s most unpopular president on record, the man he beat in elections less than two years ago is apparently decided upon making a come-back attempt for the presidency in 2017. After months of rumour over an eventual renewed bid, Nicolas Sarkozy’s political ally Bernadette Chirac, wife of former president Jacques Chirac, told French radio on Wednesday that Sarkozy will indeed run against Hollande in the next elections in three years’ time. Her comments came as Mediapart has learnt that Sarkozy has settled more than 500,000 euros in fines imposed upon him for undisclosed expenses in his failed 2012 election campaign, opening the path for his return to the political forefront. Mathilde Mathieu reports.
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Et de trois. Une fois de plus, Patrick Balkany et son ancien bras-droit, Jean-Pierre Aubry, tous les deux mis en examen pour « blanchiment de fraude fiscale » (entre autres) et soumis à un strict contrôle judiciaire qui leur interdit de se rencontrer, se retrouvent au même moment, au même endroit, sur la même photo. Par hasard, sans aucun doute.
Pour Pièces à conviction, le journaliste Stéphane Girard a fait le reportage que Mediapart aurait dû réaliser depuis cinq ans. Consacrée aux abus dans les coulisses de l’Assemblée nationale, son enquête, diffusée ce mercredi à 23h10 sur France 3, nous embarque à Londres pour une plongée dans le (contre)-modèle britannique.
Voilà déjà une semaine que le député UMP Dominique Tian a reconnu publiquement, contraint et forcé, avoir planqué un compte en Suisse pendant des années. Voilà déjà une semaine que ce pourfendeur patenté de la fraude sociale (celle des autres, celle des « gagne-petit » qui grugent le RSA ou les allocs) a confessé avoir soustrait plus de 1,5 million d’euros au fisc français, avant de profiter d’une circulaire indulgente pour rapatrier discrètement ses billes en 2014. Et rien ne se passe ou presque.
Mediapart ne lâchera rien. Les citoyens ont le droit de savoir comment le financement des campagnes électorales est contrôlé en France. Avec quelle ardeur, quelle légèreté ou quel aveuglement. Alors que les révélations se multiplient sur les trucages opérés lors de diverses présidentielles, les documents relatifs aux instructions menées par la Commission nationale des comptes de campagne (CNCCFP) sont toujours tenus au secret. En ce vendredi 13 mars, les choses pourraient basculer.
La fortune les abandonne. Hier, Patrick Balkany (mis en examen pour « corruption » et « blanchiment de fraude fiscale ») et son bras-droit Jean-Pierre Aubry (mis en examen pour « complicité de corruption » et « blanchiment de fraude fiscale ») ont manqué de chance : ils ont été repérés discutant devant L’Anjou, un restaurant de Levallois-Perret, alors que le contrôle judiciaire auquel est soumis le second lui interdit de rencontrer le premier –précisément pour éviter qu’ils n’échangent sur l’information judiciaire en cours, menée par les juges Renaud van Ruymbeke et Patricia Simon.
