Journaliste au pôle Enquêtes, j'ai rejoint Mediapart en janvier 2011, après avoir été pigiste à Libération (1986-1987), reporter spécialisé justice au Parisien (1988-1998), et grand reporter en charge de l'investigation au Journal du Dimanche (1999-2010).
J'ai publié plusieurs livres: "Un magistrat politique. Enquête sur Jean-Claude Marin, le procureur le plus puissant de France" (Pygmalion, 2015), "Qui veut la mort du juge d'instruction?" (Les Carnets de l'Info, 2007), et "Adjugé, volé. Chronique d'un trafic à Drouot" (Max Milo, 2011).
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 85-year-old French artist who co-created the world-famous Astérix comic book series is surrounded by advisers and employees who benefit enormously from his largesse. Crying foul play, Albert Uderzo’s only daughter succeeded in getting an examining magistrate to look into the affair. Mediapart's Michel Deléan reveals the inside story of the ongoing investigation.
In an unprecedented action involving a former head of state of France, police have searched the Paris home of former president Nicolas Sarkozy as part of the ongoing investigation into suspected corruption scams surrounding L'Oréal heiress Liliane Bettencourt. Investigators also searched Sarkozy's former presidential offices and his lawyers' offices. Michel Deléan reports.
C'est une première pour un ancien président de la République. Le domicile, le cabinet d'avocats et les bureaux de Nicolas Sarkozy ont été perquisitionnés mardi, dans le cadre de l'affaire Bettencourt. Philippe Courroye est convoqué devant le CSM, et la juge Prévost-Desprez se voit reprocher une « violation du secret professionnel ».
Magistrates investigating a suspected gigantic web of corruption spun around the financial affairs of L’Oréal heiress Liliane Bettencourt on Wednesday placed a lawyer in charge of her wealth investments under formal investigation for taking advantage of the 89 year-old matriarch’s diminished mental faculties. Pascal Wilhelm, appointed as a legal protector of Bettencourt’s financial interests, is the second of her wealth managers to be suspected of corruption. The case notably involves an investment he organised of 143 million euros of the matriarch’s private fortune in a company owned by reality TV show and online gambling entrepreneur Stéphane Courbit, which Bettencourt cannot remember making. Michel Deléan 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.
Magistrates in Bordeaux last week ordered that Patrice de Maistre, former wealth manager for L’Oréal heiress Liliane Bettencourt, should continue to be kept in preventive detention while they continue investigations into his role in a series of massive and mysterious cash withdrawals from the billionaire’s secret Swiss bank accounts. The judges have uncovered further evidence, described by one source close to the case as “solid”, that suggests some of the money was used to illegally fund outgoing French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s 2007 election campaign – which is also suspected of being illegally financed by the late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. Lawyers for Maistre complained that he was being kept in jail to “pressure” him into confessing the scam. Michel Deléan reports on the latest developments in the Bettencourt case, now rapidly closing in on Sarkozy, who will hand over office to newly-elected François Hollande on Tuesday.
The role of the authorities in hunting the gunman who carried out the atrocities in Toulouse and Montauban in south-west France has come under the microscope since the main suspect was shot dead in a siege at his flat. Questions have been raised about how long it took to locate Mohamed Merah after the first attack, and to what extent the French intelligence agency had been monitoring him before the murders took place. Michel Deléan reports.
The official watchdog for the maintenance of the fundamental human rights of people in detention in France presented its latest yearly report on Wednesday. The 326-page document is a compilation of its investigations and findings for the year 2011, in which it notably denounced increasing prison overcrowding, the practice of humiliating body searches and an emphasis on security rather than reinsertion. Michel Deléan reports.
This article has been censored
A ruling by the Versailles court of appeal on July 4th 2013 has ordered that Mediapart must remove from its website all articles which contain extracts from the so-called ‘butler tapes’ at the heart of the Bettencourt affair. The penalty for not doing so is 10,000 euros per article per day (effective from July 21st). Mediapart has appealed against the ruling.
This article has been censored
A ruling by the Versailles court of appeal on July 4th 2013 has ordered that Mediapart must remove from its website all articles which contain extracts from the so-called ‘butler tapes’ at the heart of the Bettencourt affair. The penalty for not doing so is 10,000 euros per article per day (effective from July 21st). Mediapart has appealed against the ruling.
Former French budget minister Eric Woerth faces being placed under formal investigation - one step short of being charged - over a sale he ordered when in office of state-owned forest land to a horse-racing company, after a preliminary enquiry into the deal has been told it was concluded at just one third of the real value, Mediapart can reveal.
Former French President Jacques Chirac (pictured) was on Thursday given a two-year suspended prison sentence for embezzling public funds when he was mayor of Paris to finance his political party and advisors for his presidential election campaign strategy. Chirac, 79, is the second French head of state to be tried by a court of justice, after the country's wartime collaborationist Vichy government leader, Marshal Philippe Pétain, in 1945. Michel Deléan reports.
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Je ne veux pas d’antisémites, de négationnistes, de racistes, de xénophobes, d’islamophobes, d’homophobes ni de franchouillards souverainistes aux plus hautes fonctions de l’Etat. J'irai voter le 7 mai.
Évoquer des « prises d'otages » ou du « terrorisme » pour disqualifier les mouvements sociaux actuels n'est pas meilleur pour la démocratie que ce qu'on prétend combattre.
En presque cinquante ans de carrière, David Bowie a expérimenté une multitude de créations, sans commettre aucune faute de goût. Promenade subjective en musique et en images.
