New documents seen by Mediapart give the lie to claims that the substantial discounts offered by events company GL Events on its services to Emmanuel Macron's 2017 election campaign were simply part of “normal” commercial practice. When Mediapart revealed a few days ago that the Macron campaign received discounts worth many thousands of pounds, both the company's boss Olivier Ginon and the Élysée brushed aside any claims of favouritism from GL Events. Ginon himself wrote to Mediapart insisting that the discounts had been available to all.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
But the new documents from election campaign accounts show that two of the other main candidates, the socialist Benoît Hamon and conservative François Fillon, did not enjoy the same cut-price deals from the firm, even though they also used a building that GL Events rented to the Macron campaign.
One of the services at the heart of the affair concerns the hire of the Maison de la Mutalité in Paris to which GL Events, France's leading events firm, owns the concession. Emmanuel Macron rented this space for his political rally on July 12th, 2016, when he had just launched his En Marche! movement and did not yet have any funds from the many large-scale donors he was later to attract.
As Mediapart has reported, the En Marché candidate received substantial discounts, right up to 100%, for the rental of the location on the eve of the event. According to Mediapart's calculations these discounts reduced the overall bill by 33,819.87 euros out of a total of 92,000 euros, taking into account the rent of the room and other services such as security and greeting visitors.
On the rental section of the bill alone the discounts cut the amount owed by 28,972.75 euros, bringing the cost down to 25,710.25 euros.
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These sums are even more astonishing when one considers that the two other candidates who organised political rallies at the Maison de la Mutaalité did not benefit from any discounts.
Yet the Socialist Party (PS) candidate Benoît Hamon held two meetings at the centre in successive weeks; the first, smaller gathering, on January 29th, 2017, and the second for his formal investiture as the PS candidate a week later on February 5th. “The party paid the full rate,” Hamon himself has confirmed.
For the February 5th meeting, which was similar in scale and services to the one Macron held, the PS's bill for the rental alone came to 43,523 euros, nearly 20,000 more than the En Marche! candidate and attracted no discount. The word “discount” in fact does not feature at all on the PS bill from GL Events.
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For the campaign event on January 29th, Hamon had hired several rooms on the third floor at the Mutualité for a total of 17,871 euros. Once again the socialist candidate got no rental discount. However, on this bill there was a “discount” column. Under the “services” section - the total of which came to 33,119.60 euros – Hamon did get a mini-reduction on the cost of the “wine service”. The amount: 32.40 euros or just 0.001% of the total sum.
It was the same situation with François Fillon. According to a bill revealed on April 29th by Europe 1 radio, the conservative candidate received no discount for his political rally at the Maison de la Mutualité on January 14th, 2017. The location hire fees for him were 44,000 euros and there is no discount column on the bill.
And as Mediapart pointed out in its original article, the right-wing candidate did not receive any discount either for the hire of other venues run by GL Events, the Nice Acropolis in Nice, in the south of France, and the Eurexpo centre at Lyon in the east. On the LCI news channel the spokesperson for the right-wing Les Républicains, Lydia Guirous, attacked “unfair competition”. She added: “There needs to be a bigger investigation and full light should be shed on this affair”.
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This latest information weakens the defence put forward by GL Events and Macron's aides over the discounts. First of all to the election campaign watchdog the Commission Nationale des Comptes de Campagnes et des Financements Politiques (CNCCFP) and then in their responses to Mediapart, the events firm and the former candidate's team explained that the reduced rate for the services provided for the election campaign were simply part of normal commercial practice.
Discounted rates were “standard and regular with a view to building customer loyalty”, the campaign's accountant wrote to the CNCCFP on October 20th, 2017, justifying the reductions offered by GL Events and other companies. On Friday April 27th, before the publication of Mediapart's first article in French, Olivier Ginon wrote to say that the services “were billed according to criteria common to all”. The Élysée also explained that the campaign service rates had been handled by En Marche!'s events unit and were the result of an “aggressive approach in commercial negotiations”.
However, in a press statement on Monday 30th April, GL Events suddenly put forward a new argument to justify its large discounts to the Macron campaign at the Mutualité. “It involves a standard discount in the summer period in Paris by managers of event sites, in a context of very strong competition and low activity during the summer period,” it said. However, the price reductions continued after the summer period: several discounts discovered by Mediapart for the hire of equipment were given in the winter of 2016 and the spring of 2017.
The defence put forward by GL Events also raises questions in relation to the current legislation on campaign funding. Donations and benefits in kind from private companies have been completely banned since the 1995 law on the funding of public life and the CNCCFP is quite clear on the matter: to avoid any disguised funding of an election campaign by a company “the discounts agreed by suppliers [editor's note, generally tolerated under the threshold of 20%] are forbidden when they don't come within the limits of customary commercial practice”. The invoices sent to François Fillon and Benoît Hamon show that the deals offered to Macron's campaign do not fall under this heading of customary practice.
Meanwhile opposition politicians have caused for investigations into the revelations over GL Events and the Macron campaign. Alexis Corbière, an MP for the radical left La France Insoumise party, said that it was understandable if there were a few variations in price “but a 100% discount is absurd! And then it raises the question of what it is done in return for”. The movement's spokesperson, Manuel Bombard, said they have already called for a “Parliamentary committee of inquiry” to look into the election campaign.
Benoît Hamon, who since the election has founded the Génération.s movement, said: “These bonuses are the umpteenth symptom of a blurring of the lines between public and private. It's the tip of the iceberg.”
Valérie Boyer, an MP for the conservative Les Républicains, pointed to the evident embarrassment inside the Élysée. “As if by chance, at the moment this affair breaks we learn that the Macron couple pay for their own dogfood [editor's note, for their dog Nemo] and council tax,” she said. “It's clearly a distraction to create a diversion. This affair reminds us that Macron came from the system and is supported by the system, contrary to what he likes to claim.”
But Hugues Renson, an MP for the ruling La Marche en République (LREM), spoke simply of “allegations from Mediapart” and noted that the campaign accounts had been validated by the CNCCFP. “It's not for Mediapart to decide what is authorised and what isn't authorised,” he said.
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- The French version of this report can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter