Last December, the secretary general of the conservative UMP party group in the French Senate, Alain Sauret, received 173,000 euros in indemnity payments after leaving his post to become, immediately afterwards, an advisor for the president of the upper house, UMP Senator Gérard Larcher, Mediapart can reveal.
The sum, paid from funds provided by the public purse, was a redundancy payment negotiated with the newly-appointed head of the UMP group of senators, Bruno Retailleau. After taking up his position last October, Retailleau decided to replace Sauret with a secretary general of his own choice.
The indemnity was equivalent to Sauret’s gross annual salary (he was paid more than 14,000 euros per month) and was mutually agreed after weeks of negotiations. Sauret left his job on December 20th, and in January he returned to the Senate to take up his new job as advisor to Larcher on issues concerning French overseas territories, for which he receives a monthly salary of about 7,000 euros.
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Both Retailleau and Larcher belong to the same political current within the UMP party, rallied behind the former French prime minister François Fillon.
Following an alert by the finance ministry’s anti-money laundering agency Tracfin, a judicial investigation was launched last year into a suspected system of fraudulent payments to members of the UMP party group in the Senate, where Sauret has worked for the conservatives for some 30 years and is regarded as one of their most influential staff. Up until last December he had been secretary general of the upper house’s UMP party group for 12 years, and prior to those he had served in the same role for the RPR party, which was dissolved to create the UMP in 2002.
The payment of the indemnity sum to Sauret is quite legal. Parliamentary groups are allowed by law to “freely administrate” their structures, including the salaries paid to staff or payments – sometimes exorbitant – for the services of communications advisors. But a moral question is raised by what could be interpreted as a ‘golden parachute’ payment to Sauret financed by the public purse: about 10 million euros are distributed among the different groups every year to fund their parliamentary activities, which are also financed, to a lesser degree, from contributions by members of the groups.
Sauret refutes the suggestion that he was given a ‘golden parachute’ payment. “A dismissal for no reasons of professional fault would have cost the group much more,” Sauret told Mediapart. “Ask a lawyer in labour law. At an industrial tribunal, I could have obtained two or three years’ salary. The total was negotiated between the head of the group and myself. You know, at 60-years-old, it’s actually quite distressing to find oneself unemployed.”
In the event, Sauret was professionally inactive for a period of just a few weeks. He said that he was given no guarantee of finding another job when he signed the redundancy agreement. “The negotiations about my mutually-agreed termination began in October,” he added. “I made contact with president Larcher to see if he could take me on, but there was a certain lapse of time. I could just as well have signed on the unemployment register. I imagine I would have earned more doing nothing at home. I would have been depressed.”
Mediapart has learnt that the UMP group in the Senate has about 5.5 million euros in its coffers, built up over a period of several years in all secrecy – the accounts of the group, like those of its socialist and centrist counterparts have, as the law allows, never been published. The estimate of the UMP group’s 5.5 million euros comes from an internal audit ordered by Bruno Retailleau after he was elected last October as the group’s new president.
His election came just weeks after Mediapart revealed a list of 10 UMP senators who had received secret payments in cash and cheques, between 2009 and 2012, totalling 400,000 euros and for no clear reason. The payments were made via a shell association, the Republican Union of the Senate (URS).
Two examining magistrates, judges René Cros and Emmanuelle Legrand, are leading an investigation into the nature of the payments, citing suspected ‘misuse of public funds’ and ‘money laundering’. Their enquiries are currently centred on unravelling the complex routes by which funds from the UMP group, whose treasury is required by law to support only strictly parliamentary activities, could be siphoned off.
In February Mediapart revealed how Senator Henri de Raincourt, a former head of the UMP group in the upper house, received a monthly automatic bank transfer of 4,000 euros between 2009 and 2011, paid from a secret UMP Senate group account, when he was serving as a junior minister under the presidency of Nicolas Sarkozy. Raincourt subsequently admitted receiving the payments, transferred via a UMP party group account with a branch of HSBC situated close to the Senate.
Following the revelations of the UMP group’s questionable financial practices by Mediapart, and other media, and against the backdrop of the ongoing judicial investigation, the Senate’s administration announced on March 11th that new regulations will be introduced as of 2015 by which the political groups of the upper house must be registered as associations and submit their accounts to an audit which will be made public. That followed a similar move announced last September by the lower house, the General Assembly.
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- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse