Just six months after the death in mysterious circumstances of Richard Descoings, head of one of France’s most prestigious higher education institutions, the Paris Institute of Political Studies, whose body was found in a New York hotel, the venerable school has been rocked again, this time by a scathing report from France’s national audit office which reveals gross financial mismanagement by Descoings and his senior colleagues who paid themselves a gravy-train existence of massive salary hikes and bonus awards.
The report by auditors from the quasi-judicial Cour des comptes (Court of Accounts), due to be published in full next month, was partially leaked on Monday by French daily Le Monde. It confirms a series of investigations by Mediapart, beginning in 2009 (available here in French only), which disclosed how Descoings and a small circle of management colleagues awarded themselves payments and perks from the institution’s mostly publicly-funded finances, well above the salaries and conditions given to other French higher education managers.
French higher education and research minister, Geneviève Fioraso, has ordered that the appointment of Descoings’ successor be delayed until after the Cour de Comptes renders its report public.
The auditors’ findings are severely damning of Descoings’ until-now lauded 16-year leadership of the school, more commonly known as ‘Sciences Po’ and widely regarded as one of the most reputable in Europe. Descoings was praised for developing the school’s international standing (it has numerous partnerships with institutions worldwide, including master’s degree courses with the London School of Economics), for dismantling a previously socially exclusive student admissions policy and for de-centralizing the school to six new campuses around France.
But the auditors found that “the development of Sciences-Po was only able to be carried out at the price of financial [irresponsibility] and little-scrupulous management of public money”.
They denounced the “legal muddle” that exists with the co-existence of the public institution that is the Paris Institute of Political Studies and the private status of the National Foundation of Political Sciences which governs its administration, which the auditors suggest has created a basis for management abuses.
The auditors highlight how the school’s senior management profited from massive pay increases and bonus payments that escaped any internal or external control. In 2010, Descoings, who was head of Sciences Po from 1996 until his death in April this year, was paid an annual salary of 537,246 euros, a comparatively extraordinary amount in the French higher education sector, and had increased his pay between 2005 and 2011 by 60%.
Descoings, 53, a friend of former French President Nicolas Sarkozy, was found dead on the morning of April 3rd in his room at the Manhattan Michelangelo Hotel, where he was staying while attending Columbia University’s annual Global Colloquium of University Presidents. The New York City Medical Examiner’s Office found that he died of a heart attack, and that no “outside influences” were involved.
However, US media reported that his laptop, which was found alongside his mobile phone thrown onto a third-floor ledge outside the hotel, had been used to trawl gay dating websites and that he had received unidentified male visitors the previous night.
Descoing’s wife, Nadia Marik, who he appointed as Sciences-Po’s deputy director for strategy and development in 2002, two years before they married, continues to sit on the school’s board of directors.
Dodgy bonuses, loans and free apartments
Meanwhile, the auditors detailed how French economist Jean-Claude Casanova, the president of the National Foundation of Political Sciences, where Descoings held the post of administrator, was paid 69,000 euros in bonuses in 2009, on top of his salary. In both 2010 and 2011, Casanova received bonuses of 36,000 euros.
As Mediapart revealed in a report last year, the bonus payments were awarded in secret by a management committee led by Descoings and which left no records of its meetings. The auditors’ report also noted that the bonus system breached tax laws. “The payment of bonuses has nothing to do with professional standards,” a disgruntled senior figure at the school told Mediapart, speaking on condition of anonymity. “There are those who are always given a rise and those who never receive one,” he added.
The auditors have also lifted the lid on a cozy system of housing perks given to staff. They cite the example of one of the school’s research directors who was given five years’ free accommodation in a Latin Quarter apartment, on the rue d’Ulm, for which they estimate the potential monthly rental fee at 3,257 euros.
They also slammed the manner in which four loans had been contracted by the school between 2005 and 2010, one of which they described as “speculative and dangerous”, despite the fact that former BNP-Paribas bank chief Michel Pébereau sits on the Sciences-Po management board (and as such also participated in awarding the extraordinary bonuses to selected fellow managers). The auditors recommend that hitherto any further moves for loans should first be vetted by the French finance ministry.
While Sciences-Po is mostly state-financed – 57% of its annual budget in 2010 was paid for from the public purse – it has over recent years increased its student registration fees (a master’s degree course for the last academic year cost 13,000 euros) which are above those of similarly prestigious higher education management schools like HEC and Essec. It also attracts a growing amount of funding from private businesses. As a result, the auditors recommend that the education ministry “revise down, at least in part” the subsidies it provides to the school, which amounted to 63.3 million euros in 2010. “The absence of any control exercised by the state, despite it being the principal financier [of Sciences-Po], appears to be particularly at fault,” the auditors comment.
They also denounced the “legal muddle” that exists with the co-existence of the public institution that is the Paris Institute of Political Studies and the private status of the National Foundation of Political Sciences which governs its administration, which the auditors suggest has created a basis for management abuses.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, one of the auditors said he had been “extrememly surprised” to discover the extent of the school’s “clan-like functioning” which he described as “incomprehensible”. He said their findings, such as the secret bonus payment system, may be taken up by the national audit office’s Court of Budget and Financial Discipline which has the power to impose heavy fines on those it judges to have acted improperly. However, there appears to be no suggestion at present that separate criminal proceedings will be engaged.
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English version: Graham Tearse