Former interior minister Michèle Alliot-Marie introduced a series of measures favourable to the casino industry at the same time as she and her family were buying shares in casino firms, according to documents seen by Mediapart. The shares were bought by associations controlled by Alliot-Marie's family after she became head of the Ministry of the Interior – which is responsible for the gambling industry in France – under the conservative government of President Nicolas Sarkozy in May 2007.
Alliot-Marie, a close ally of former president Jacques Chirac, later became foreign minister but had to quit in February 2011 after revelations about her ties with Tunisian strongman Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, links which emerged during the Arab Spring uprising that ousted him. MAM, as the politician is often known after her initials, is now a Euro MP.
Michèle Alliot-Marie took office at the Ministry of the Interior on May 18th, 2007, and quickly showed that she was attentive to demands from the casino and gaming industry to reduce their regulatory burden. At the same time, according to documents seen by Mediapart, two associations run by her family were investing some of their fortune in casino company shares.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
The first organisation involved was an association called Le Rayon Vert, a charity set up in 1960 and whose official aims are to help the least fortunate in society. It had been controlled by the Marie family for nearly 40 years and in 2007 it was in fact headed by MAM in person. Her father Bernard Marie, who had been a Member of Parliament and mayor of the upmarket resort of Biarritz in south-west France from 1977 to 1991, and who died in February 2015, was vice-president. The treasurer was Michèle Alliot-Marie's niece Ludivine Olive, who was also the new interior minister's chief of staff.
According to the proceedings of the Le Rayon Vert's general assembly dated October 7th, 2008 – MAM was detained in Paris so her father presided – there was a curious stock market investment made by the association. This involved the purchase of 94,202 euros worth of shares in the bank Natixis and a company called Électricité et Eaux de Madagascar (EEM). EEM turns out to be a discreet holding company involved in the hotel industry in Cambodia and property in the Paris region but which above all has shares in the Société française de casinos (SFC), which owns casinos in France. The association also held 2,000 shares in the Partouche Group which today owns 41 of the nearly 200 casinos in France. Based on average market prices in 2007 this stake was worth around 32,000 euros.
On the face of it, these investments have little connection with the charity's social aims, which have not changed since it was founded, and which are to help “disadvantaged people or people in difficulty who live in Biarritz or on the Basque coast”. Yet the family's interest in the casino industry continued. Also in 2007 the organisation Association pour l'organisation de festivals (AOF), of which Bernard Marie was president and MAM a member, invested in the same two companies, Électricité et Eaux de Madagascar (1,000 shares with a value of 17,753 euros) and the Partouche Group.
It seems the gamble paid off. Thanks to these investments, as well as shares in large groups such as utility firm Suez, Natixis and finance group Dexia, as well as a more exotic investment in oil firm Maurel & Prom, the two associations earned healthy dividends: 10,677 euros for the AOF in 2007 and 19,133 euros for Le Rayon Vert in 2008.
Meanwhile, as interior minister, Michèle Alliot-Marie had coincidentally also been heavily involved with the casino industry, overseeing the relaxation of the regulations that were in force. On October 16th, 2007, for example, MAM announced her intention to allow casinos to get involved in the lucrative online gambling market. It is true that the European Commission had already been pushing France to reform in this area but some countries were baulking at the idea of liberalising a sector that was, in particular, a major target of money laundering.
Shares in the Partouche Group rose by more than 10% following the announcement. “A record session in terms of volume of trades for the Partouche Groupe with more than 2 million securities traded,” noted the specialist stock exchange website Boursier.com with approval on October 18th.
“We consider that the group's main future in gambling resides in the opening of the market and the forthcoming grant of authorization for the operating of games on the internet. That is a turning point in the development of the industry and the group,” said the board of directors of the Société française de casinos, a company in which the Marie family were shareholders. At the same time Isidore Partouche, of the group that bears her name, welcomed the fact that “the public authorities [have] at last started to act” towards “adapting what we offer”. The bill to open up competition and regulations in the online gambling industry was finally tabled in March 2009, just before Michèle Alliot-Marie left the interior ministry to become justice minister.
But the Ministry of the Interior's benevolence did not stop there. On December 24th, 2008, for example, when Alliot-Marie was still in charge, the ministry issued a decree allowing casinos to organise poker tournaments outside their own premises. The ministry also abolished the restriction limiting the number of such competitions that could be organised a year to 100, while the required notice period for a casino to notify the police authorities of such events was shortened. It was a welcome Christmas present for the Partouche Group, the Lucien Barrière Group and other major casino-owning groups who were by now feeling the pinch from the unfolding financial crisis. In 2009 the ministry also referred a new decree to the country's top administrative body, the Conseil d'État, that relaxed the conditions under which permits to operate slot machines could be granted.
A family fortune
It should be noted that the Partouche family are very close friends with the Marie family. With her partner Patrick Ollier, the MP and mayor of Rueil-Malmaison, west of Paris, Michèle Alliot-Marie spent the summer holidays in 2007 at the Partouches' Méridien hotel at Juan-les-Pins, between Cannes and Antibes on the Mediterranean coast. Group chief executive Patrick Partouche and his wife meanwhile used to visit the Marie family on the Basque coast, and MAM's niece Ludivine Olive was close to one of the sons of the casino group's owners. It was also one of the Partouches' close business colleagues, Yassine Ben Abdessalem, who used to run part of the group's Swiss operations, who was with Alliot-Marie during her ill-fated stay in Tabarka in Tunisia at the end of 2010, which cost MAM her job as foreign minister.
A senior official and aide to Alliot-Marie confirms that the Ministry of the Interior was attentive to the casino industry during this period. David Sénat, who was part of MAM's private office from 2003 to 2010 at a string of ministries, describes in his book La République des conseillers ('The Republic of Advisors'), published by Grasset, how the casino owners had “laid siege” to the ministerial office.
Sénat, who was dismissed in 2010 after being accused of organising leaks in the Bettencourt affair, cites another significant decision by the ministry at this time, one that has hitherto passed unnoticed. This was the “enforced departure” of Bernard Magniny, who had been president of the gambling commission, the Commission supérieure des jeux, since the 1990s. Apparently this senior state advisor with a good reputation had fallen victim to his own “rigour and caution, judged excessive by the owners of certain establishments placed under his authority”.
Meanwhile the curious stock market investments made by Le Rayon Vert and the AOF did not create any waves inside those associations. The Marie family, who monopolised all the management positions in them, “only gave brief explanations about these activities. We were not informed,” a source close to the associations told Mediapart, on condition of anonymity.
Enlargement : Illustration 2
The justice system has not, as yet, looked into the casino affair. However, in 2013 the authorities did examine the family's various associations. The Tracfin anti-money laundering unit at the Ministry of Finance flagged some suspicious money transfers to the Chantaco hotel at Saint-Jean-de-Luz near Biarritz, an hotel of which Michèle Alliot-Marie and her late father were joint owners. In October 2013, as many media outlets reported, the prosecution authorities opened a full investigation into alleged “breach of confidence to the detriment of several local associations”.
Three weeks later Bernard Marie sent an email to a colleague in which he showed his anger over the affair: “The origin [of the affair] is the bank HSBC to whom I had entrusted all the accounts of which I was the holder whether in a personal capacity or as the beneficial owner...this trust allowed this bank to make the connection between the cheques that I had issued … payable to the Hotel Chantaco and our association [editor's note, the AOF].” Michèle Alliot-Marie and Bernard Marie both left the HSBC and spread their association and personal accounts between several establishments. On March 18th, 2014 detectives conducting the investigation searched the pair's homes in Neuilly, in western Paris, and on the Basque coast.
In December 2014 the investigative weekly Le Canard enchaîné described how the money from a third family association, the Fondation du Bénévolat, fed the coffers of the Chantaco hotel. The seminars arranged by this foundation, which was recognised as a body serving the public good and had been funded to the tune of five million francs (762,000 euros) by the department for youth and sport, of which MAM was then minister, all took place at the hotel. These seminars, which ten to 20 guests took part in, were billed at around 10,000 euros a time. In 2010 the amount was 10,980 euros, 13,374 in 2011 and 11,009 euros in 2012. Bernard Marie signed the cheque for the payments, which he then paid in himself at the other end of the chain.
In reality money came from everywhere to bail out the hotel. The AOF received an annual funding allocation of 23,783 euros from the tourism office at Saint-Jean-de-Luz, a town where Michèle Alliot-Marie was mayor and deputy mayor between 1995 and 2014. With this money the association lavishly funded a festival for young directors which was held every year from 1996 to 2013. The banquets, receptions and overnight stays at the hotel represented one of the main source of spending by the event: 31,840 euros in 2003, 42,589 euros in 2004, 37,759 euros in 2005, 22,958.97 euros in 2006 and 31,607.14 euros in 2007.
It was a seamless and smooth-running system. In 2011, for example, a total of 53,344 euros from the associations found its way into the hotel's coffers. This is no small sum when one considers that in that year the total official turnover for the luxury hotel, which today has few guests and has not renewed its star rating since 2010, was no more than 122,000 euros.
Indeed, between the three associations, the Fondation du Bénévolat, the AOF and the Rayon Vert, the Marie family was sitting on a pile of gold. According to Mediapart's calculations, the net worth of AOF was 379,917 euros at the end of 2012 (including a share portfolio worth 187,262 euros and an apartment bought for 180,000 euros). Le Rayon Vert, which in 2010 took over the 32,000 assets of the women's information centre set up by MAM in 1980, had a total net worth of 270,892 euros at the end of 2012, of which 228,456 euros were in shares. However the wealthiest was the Fondation du Bénévolat which had assets of 1,308,797 at the end of 2012. The total net worth of these three associations was thus close to two million euros, even though they are not very active today.
After Bernard Marie's death in February 2015, the third generation of the family took active steps to keep their hands on the precious heritage. In the spring of 2015 Michèle Alliot-Marie's nephew, Florimond Olive, who is her chief of staff at the European Parliament, became the new president of AOF in curious circumstances. There is no trace of his election or of the names of the new office holders being deposited at the local state office or prefecture; this young entrepreneur appears to have taken on his grandfather's role at the association just as one inherits a family property.
The Marie family has, in fact, long had a connection with the world of gambling. In the autumn of 1990 it was an affair involving a casino that ended the political career of Bernard Marie, who was then mayor of Biarritz. In that year his plan to destroy the existing Art Deco casino on the Grande Plage beach in this tourist paradise and replace it with a brand-new hotel casino turned a majority of the town against him. Now, 25 years later, the family's interest in slot machines could dash his daughter Michèle Alliot-Marie's hopes of being re-elected as president of the local branch of the conservative opposition party Les Républicains in the département or county of Pyrénées-Atlantiques.
Questioned about the Marie family's timely stock investments, Michèle Alliot-Marie's nephew and chief of staff, Florimond Olive, played down the former minister's role in the matter, despite the fact that she was the president of one of the associations concerned at the time and a member of the other. “These investments were made several years ago by Bernard Marie. In an association there is one person who is in charge of investments. Why were those shares chosen? Michèle Alliot-Marie won't be able to tell you. Probably because there was an interest in doing so. Bernard Marie didn't communicate with anyone on those issues. He took his own decisions.” Bernard Marie died in February 2015, so of course he is not in a position to confirm or deny this.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter