French environment minister François de Rugy, an outspoken campaigner for greater transparency in public office, resigned from the government on Tuesday July 16th following a string of revelations about his lifestyle at public expense and as Mediapart was preparing to publish new disclosures. On Monday Mediapart sent a number of questions to de Rugy, in particular about how he used his expenses as a Member of Parliament to pay his party subscription when he was a member of the green Europe Écologie Les Verts (EELV) party.
These latest disclosures do not just concern the minister's business dinners and his grand dinner parties for friends on the public purse, the Mediapart revelations that first embroiled him in a major controversy. They also suggest a blurring of the line on his part between personal expenditure and those made in his capacity as an MP.
For the man who was, until he quit, the number two in President Emmanuel Macron's government behind prime minister Édouard Philippe, used his expenses as an MP to pay some of his subscriptions to the EELV party in 2013 and 2014, according to a new investigation by Mediapart.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
These payments raise two problems for de Rugy: firstly, MPs' expenses - known as IRFM in French for 'Indemnité Représentative de Frais de Mandat' – which were reformed in 2017 to increase the level of controls, are not intended to be used to finance a political party. Secondly, François de Rugy used these payments to offset his tax liability in 2015 as Mediapart has revealed (see here). This raises tax issues, as MPs' expenses are exempt from tax.
When contacted about this by Mediapart the environment minister did not respond. After asking to put back the deadline for Mediapart's latest investigation – initially set for 1pm French time on Tuesday July 16th - François de Rugy announced his resignation in a statement to the French news agency AFP at 2.40pm.
On his Facebook page François de Rugy stated that the “effort required to defend myself means that I am not able to carry out calmly and effectively the task that was given to me by the President of the Republic and the prime minister”.
The now former minister – who after standing down from the government will once more become an MP – also used his Facebook page to criticise the media, and especially Mediapart. “The attacks and media lynching that my family has been the subject of today leads me to take a necessary step backwards – which everyone will understand,” he wrote. “I am too attached to the environment, to which I have devoted all my commitment as an activist, to allow our environmental actions to be weakened by these endless personal attacks.”
François de Rugy also announced that he was taking action for defamation against Mediapart, talking of “falsehoods” and of a “desire to damage, to sully and to discredit”.
The new revelations further weakened the position of a minister who was already embroiled in controversy after Mediapart's revelations about his grand dinners, the work carried out on his ministerial apartment, the social housing flat used by his chief of staff and his own social housing apartment in Nantes in western France. The impact of the revelations was increased by the fact that since becoming an MP in 2007, François de Rugy has built his political career on the issue of transparency, in particular in relation to MPs' expenses.
In October 2011 the green MP, who was then in the opposition during Nicolas Sarkozy's presidency, and three other MPs had put forward legislation seeking to oblige Parliamentarians to make public the way they used their allowances or credits to pay for expenses relating to their work as an elected representative.
“Any absence of transparency, any refusal to divulge detailed and full information on elected members' personal situations – in terms of their wealth as much as their expenses and resources provided for the carrying out of their mandate – reinforces suspicions that are very often unjustified,” stated the co-signatories to the legislation at the time, Noël Mamère, Anny Poursinoff, Yves Cochet and François de Rugy. The bill was rejected by the ruling right-wing majority in December 2011.
“I think some MPs think they're badly paid but they don't dare say so, so we maintain this system which will cause harm to the whole political class,” de Rugy wrote in the provincial newspaper Sud-Ouest in June 2012.
In April 2013 the MP for the Loire-Atlantique département or county in western France was one of around 15 Parliamentarians who decided publicly to declare their own personal wealth. This was before the advent of the public watchdog the Haute Autorité pour la Transparence de la Vie Publique (HATVP), which was created after Mediapart's revelations about the tax affairs of the former budget minister Jérôme Cahuzac.
The green MP also published all of his expenditure on the news website Rue89 which had a section entitled “Wallet under the microscope” which looked at the French public's spending power and disposable income. At the same period de Rugy also published online the details of how he used his allowances as an MP.
The last time it was updated, in June 2013, François de Rugy stated that he spent 2,050 euros a month on his constituency office, 1,050 euros on communications expenses, 145 euros on telephone bills, 320 euros on trips, 40 euros on IT, 25 euros on paper, 360 euros on accommodation, 480 euros on restaurants and eating out, 135 euros on media subscriptions (including Mediapart), 115 euros on various expenditure and 400 for interns.
But though he is a supporter of transparency, the MP did not refer to the subscriptions paid to the green EELV party via his expenses as an MP or IRFM. On December 26th 2013 de Rugy paid 7,800 euros to the green party from his IRFM account at the Crédit Coopératif bank. The amount corresponded to half of his annual subscription; unlike donations to political parties, subscriptions to political parties have no upper limit. The following December the MP paid a cheque for 1,400 euros for the same purpose from the same IRFM account.
This means that a total of 9,200 euros from de Rugy's MP expenses or allowance was diverted from its objective to fund the EELV's coffers. “Using your IRFM to pay your [party] subscription as an MP? That's totally irregular and it always has been,” says centrist MP Charles de Courson, the vice-chair of the National Assembly's finance committee. “This has always been a settled issue. Public money (the IRFM) cannot be diverted to a political party.”
The IRFM system, which until recently lacked a system of controls, has long been open to abuse: it has been used for family expenditure, paying for electoral offices and political funding.
After two years looking into the issue, in February 2015 the administrative office at the National Assembly finally drew up the first detailed rules for using the IRFM by defining expenditure that was “legally forbidden”. Using the IRFM to fund subscriptions to political parties was an abuse of the system, the National Assembly noted.
Before that decision, the practice had been “not recommended ethically”, in the words of the National Assembly's ethical code. Despite that, a number of Parliamentarians since 2013 have sought guidance under the ethical code about “the possibility of paying for a subscription to a political party”. These requests have been met with a clear response: “...the payment of a subscription to a political party is not an expense associated with a [political] term of office.”
In 2017 the Haute Autorité pour la Transparence de la Vie Publique (HATVP) looked into the substantial increases in the declarations of wealth made by Parliamentarians from the previous Parliament. These checks resulted in the watchdog referring 15 cases (seven involving MPs, and eight involving Senators) to the national financial crime prosecutions unit the Parquet National Financier (PNF) over suspicion of the misuse of public funds regarding Parliamentary expense allowances or IRFM, as L'Express news weekly magazine revealed in December 2018.
Among these 15 elected representatives is the MP from the ruling La République en Marche (LREM) party, Thierry Solère (see Mediapart's investigation here), and the former Paris MP and ex-first secretary of the Socialist Party (PS) Jean-Christophe Cambadélis. According to Le Monde, Cambadélis is suspected of having used his IRFM for unauthorised expenditure, in particular to pay his subscription to the PS, after the National Assembly set out the rules in black and white in February 2015.
François de Rugy's situation raises another potential difficulty too. According to his 2015 tax return (see here for more details) the MP deducted his entire EELV subscription from his income, including the parts paid by his MP's expense allowance or IRFM.
“Deducting these subscriptions from one's taxes, I'd never have thought of that, even though I've got a good imagination,” says one old hand from the ruling LREM. The finance committee vice-chair Charles de Courson notes: “I have always made my [party] donations from my personal account. It's a complete misuse. And I've always said to Parliamentarians in my group, if you do that you're taking a real risk. Using public money to obtain a reduction in tax in a personal capacity is morally indefensible.”
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- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter