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.
While austerity measures, budgetary discipline and spending cuts are the watchwords of debates inside the French parliament, the institution itself enjoys a remarkably undisciplined and high-spending regime that pays parliamentary groups yearly subsidies of almost 10 million euros and without demanding any account to ensure the money is spent for legitimate purposes. Mathilde Mathieu reports.
Members of the French Senate have recently begun publishing their outside business affairs on a new online register of members' interests. The aim is to prevent conflicts of interest between a senator’s public and private lives. The first register has thrown up a fascinating array of outside activities. But senators are under no obligation to make the declarations and there is no provision for them to publish details of how much they earn from other sources. So will self-regulation work? Mathilde Mathieu reports.
French President François Hollande pledged during his election campaign to clean up French political governance, blighted by years of recurrent scandals and conflicts of interest. Among the promises he made was that anyone who had been convicted of crimes would be excluded from government. Yet Hollande’s first act after he was sworn in was to appoint Jean-Marc Ayrault as his prime minister who, when mayor of Nantes in 1997, received a suspended prison sentence for favouritism in the allocation of a city hall contract, described by a court of audit as “a serious infringement of the rules governing public contracts”. While Ayrault insists that “my personal integrity was never in question”, his lawyers argue that he has been legally rehabilitated and have threatened to sue those who engage in “character defamation” by publicly raising the affair. Mathilde Mathieu and Michel Deléan report.
President Nicolas Sarkozy is under increasing pressure to explain how he financed his purchase of a luxurious apartment on an islet on the River Seine after information obtained by Mediapart now irrefutably confirms he did not, contrary to his claims, receive a loan worth 475,000 euros for the acquisition from the French parliament’s financial services. The revelation, provided by the French parliament’s financial and administrative commission, raises several crucial questions that the French president must now answer: why has he wrongly maintained since 2007 that he received 475,000 euros in a loan from the National Assembly? How did he raise the 282,000 euros unaccounted for in the acts of the property purchase, and from whom? Or did the property development company which sold him the apartment, and which benefitted from lucrative deals with the local town hall of which Sarkozy was then mayor and MP, offer the sum? Mathilde Mathieu and Michaël Hajdenberg report.
According to his own official declaration, President Nicolas Sarkozy has a personal wealth of 2.7 million euros. But mystery surrounds the financing of a property acquisition upon which a large part of the president’s private fortune is founded. Sarkozy has claimed that the purchase in 1997 of a luxurious apartment, which he sold in 2006 for 1,933,000 euros, was made possible thanks to a loan, when he was an MP, of some 457,000 euros from a financial service run by the French parliament. However, Mediapart can reveal that the loan is not mentioned, as it should be, in the sale agreement, published here. Furthermore, MPs were not entitled to a loan of more than 196,000 euros at the time of the purchase. Mathilde Mathieu and Michaël Hajdenberg report.
In the unfolding scandal of how Swedish furniture retail giant Ikea spied on its staff and customers in France, Mediapart has now obtained new evidence of how the chain engaged in illegally obtaining personal information about customers who lodged minor complaints with its stores over faulty goods - one involving a 200-euro cupboard - or delayed deliveries of their purchases. The cases again include the accessing of personal data from national French police files, and which could only be obtained by corrupting law enforcement officials. Mathilde Mathieu and Michaël Hajdenberg report.
In a significant development of the spying scandal engulfing Swedish furniture retail giant Ikea, Mediapart has exclusively obtained evidence that the managing director of Ikea France personally took part in an underhand espionage operation that illegally trawled for information into the personal life of one of the company’s senior staff. Documents accessed by Mediapart and published here reveal how Jean-Louis Baillot, head of the company’s French operations from 1996 to 2009, and who is now Ikea’s director for international commercial operations, was aware, approved of and encouraged the surveillance methods used by Ikea France security chief Jean-François Paris to hound and bait the company’s deputy director of communications and interior store planning, Virginie Paulin. Fabrice Arfi, Michaël Hajdenberg and Mathilde Mathieu report.
Socialist MP René Dosière has become a scourge for the French presidency and government, leading a dogged, one-man campaign to expose the truth about secret and lavish spending within the corridors of political power. Tenacious, over the past ten years he has sent more than 600 written requests to government officials demanding accounts of spending within ministries and by the presidential office. He discovered the cost of the yearly Elysée Palace July 14th Garden Party totaled almost half a million euros, leading to its cancellation, and that the average annual cost to the public purse of a minister is 17 million euros, while the cost of security arrangements for President Sarkozy’s regular official visits around France comes to an average of 450,000 euros per trip. These and other staggering revelations are published in his latest book, L’Argent de l’Etat (‘The Sate’s Money’), released this month. In this interview with Mathilde Mathieu and Michaël Hajdenberg, he details his role and methods as an ‘investigative’ MP and the reforms he hopes will be be enacted after this year’s presidential and legislative elections.
With less than 90 days to go before the French presidential elections, Socialist Party candidate François Hollande remains the frontrunner in what most observers predict will be a two-horse race with outgoing President, yet still undeclared candidate, Nicolas Sarkozy. Hollande’s companion, French journalist Valérie Trierweiler (pictured with Hollande), little-known to the public, has until now played a low-profile in the elections, while continuing her professional activities. Yet she has her own personal office at Hollande’s campaign HQ. Mathilde Mathieu and Michaël Hajdenberg have been trying, not without difficulty, to find out more about the true role of she who would be France’s next First Lady.
Campaign managers for Eva Joly (pictured), the mainstream Green candidate in next year's French presidential elections, have hit on a novel idea to protect their party, Europe Ecologie-Les Verts, from potentially disastrous financial losses if she fails to score 5% of the vote. They are seeking an insurance policy, notably with British or US companies, costed against her performance in current opinion polls. Mathilde Mathieu and Michaël Hajdenberg report.
The French national audit office report into spending by the French presidential offices during 2010 was largely complimentary over the achieved reduction in the administration's costs. However, it raised more than an eyebrow over the lack of accountability of spending on President Sarkozy's ‘communications' advisors. Mathilde Mathieu and Michaël Hadjenberg report.
Following its exclusive revelations of a plan to introduce an ethnic quota on players entering French Football Federation national training academies, Mediapart publishes here a graph (pictured) prepared by federation officials earlier this year that identified in yellow the players in its national youth and senior teams who, because of their family origins, were believed to be "susceptible at any time to play for another sporting nation" by obtaining dual nationality.
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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.
