The mayor of France's third most populous city, Lyon, the former minister of the interior and a key ally and supporter of President Emmanuel Macron, Gérard Collomb, is facing an investigation over claims of misuse of public funds. On the morning of Wednesday June 5th detectives searched the main offices at city hall and Collomb's home in the city's 5th arrondissement or district according to Le Parisien newspaper. The raid by officers from the anti corruption and fraud unit the Office Central de Lutte Contre la Corruption et les Infractions Financières et Fiscales (OCLCIFF) came on the same day that the investigative magazine Le Canard Enchaîné revealed that France's financial crimes prosecution unit, the Parquet National Financier (PNF), had opened an investigation over possible misappropriation of public money.
The detectives are examining the successive jobs held by Meriem Nouri, the former partner of Lyon's mayor Gérard Collomb. The PNF opted to open the preliminary investigation on the basis of a preliminary report by the regional audit body, the Chambre Régionale des Comptes, into the way the city has been run. That report expressed surprise at the overtime that the mayor's ex-partner received. The sums involved are estimated to be up to 500,000 euros, according to Le Parisien.
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It was in the middle of the 1990s that Gérard Collomb met Meriem Nouri, who is also known as 'Myriam'. “A beautiful young woman who worked for the Fédération Socialiste du Rhône [editor's note, the département or county where Lyon is located],” former journalist Régis Guillet wrote in 2013 in a biography of the mayor. Today Régis Guillet works in the press office at the Lyon Metropolitan authority. “Gérard Collomb threw himself into this romantic adventure as a drowning man throws himself at a lifebelt.”
After Gérard Collomb was elected as mayor of the 9th arrondissement in Lyon in 1995, Meriem Nouri was recruited as a part-time worker for the socialist group at city hall, according to Le Canard Enchaîné. Later she worked in a variety of posts for the city council, from the mayors' offices in the 3rd and 4th arrondissements to a library.
It is certainly a constant factor with Gérard Collomb's that the women in his life have worked close to him. He recruited his first wife, Geneviève Bateau, as a Parliamentary assistant after he was elected as a Member of Parliament at the National Assembly in 1981. “She worked part-time because Collomb didn't want to be accused of nepotism,” wrote Régis Guillet. The MP's Parliamentary office in Lyon was based at Rue des Deux Amants in the 9th arrondissement. After she separated from Gérard Collomb in 1994 Geneviève Bateau went on to work for another elected representative, Jean Auroux, a former government minister and then mayor of Roanne north-west of Lyon.
However, it is Collomb's second wife Caroline Rougé – he did not marry Meriem Nouri – who has until now produced the greatest political headaches for the former minister of the interior. In 2015 she began work as a judge at the administrative court at Toulon on the Mediterranean coast, having previously worked in the Rhône-Alpes region where Lyon is based. But in the summer of 2017 – just after the presidential election and after President Macron's ally Gérard Collomb had become minister of the interior – Caroline Collomb was transferred to a post in Paris.
The Conseil d'État – France's top administrative court – has twice ruled on the potential conflicts of interest between Caroline Collomb, a judge, and the political responsibilities of her husband Gérard Collomb. In September 2017 the institution's ethics committee delivered its verdict on Caroline Collomb's transfer to her job in Paris, saying it found “no form of incompatibility” between her activities and her husband's functions. But it called on her to be “particularly vigilant” in relation to her “duty of confidentiality and her professional discretion”.
Then, when she became the head of the ruling party La République en Marche (LREM) for the Rhône département in October 2017, Caroline Collomb came under heavy criticism from a local politician and lawyer. Eric Forquin, a former councillor for the conservative Les Républicains in the Lyon suburb of Caluire et Cuire, wrote to the Conseil d'État describing Caroline Collomb's change of jobs as a “bogus transfer” and criticising what he considered to be a “conflict of interest”. In February 2018 the Conseil d'État once again deliberated, and made clear that its views on the situation had not changed.
However, Caroline Collomb's appointment as the head of the LREM in the Lyon area has faced opposition from a number of the party's own members. They believe her husband Gérard Collomb is behind the appointment and accuse him of putting the local party under the control of a “clan” (see a Mediacités report on this, in French, here). Caroline Collomb “stood down” from managing the LREM locally at the start of the European election campaign, which ended last month. Officially this was to respect the duty of confidentiality that she has as a judge.
The jobs occupied by Gerard Collomb's children have also come under the microscope from rival politicians locally. No questions have been raised over the fact that one of his daughters, Anne-Laure Collomb, works for the municipal library in Lyon, but the recruitment of his son Thomas in 2009 did spark some controversy. Having worked as a police officer, he was hired as a security advisor to the Lyon region transport company SYTRAL, but was forced to resign after questions were raised by two opposition councillors. “Do I have to leave Lyon to find a job for as long as my father is the mayor?” he asked at the time.
Gérard Collomb has dismissed the claims in Le Canard Enchaîné as being part of a political plot. “The real reasons which led those who have taken the initiative to spread such information to harm me ten months before the local elections will have escaped no one,” he said.
In his biography of the Lyon mayor, Régis Guillet said of Meriem Nouri: “She speaks a lot, speaks loudly, speaks too much. Next to her [Gérard Collomb] glows, but at any moment she risks dragging him into a whirlpool which no one knows how to get out of.”
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- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter