In a statement released on Friday afternoon, the French presidential office announced it had accepted the resignation of Kader Arif, junior minister responsible for war veterans and military commemorations, the third socialist minister forced to resign amid personal scandal.
The Elysée Palace said Arif’s resignation was “in order to bring every detail to establish the truth in the framework of the public prosecutor’s preliminary investigation in which his name is cited”.
As revealed by Mediapart on Thursday, police searched Arif’s offices based at the Ministry of Defence on November 6th as part of a preliminary investigation opened in September into a series of contracts handed to companies run by relatives of Arif by the socialist-led regional council of the Midi-Pyrénées region in south-west France, where Arif has his political base and where he has long been a powerful figure within the local federation of the Socialist Party.
The companies, AWF Music which was dissolved in May 2014, and AWF, are managed by Arif’s brother, sister-in-law and nephews. Specialised in the production of public events, meetings and sound systems, they were awarded a series of contracts over several years by the Midi-Pyrénées regional council worth a total of at least more than 2 million euros. The companies also provided services for a number of meetings organised for the Socialist Party primary race in late 2011 and meetings during François Hollande’s 2012 presidential election campaign.
The investigation was prompted by a complaint lodged by the council’s conservative and centre-right opposition group with the public prosecutor’s office in Toulouse, in which it cited suspicion of “anomalies” in the manner in which the regional authorities had handed contracts to “certain companies”. More specifically, the complaint targets alleged favouritism and fraud via a system of surcharging.
The investigation has been handed the Parquet national financier (PNF), specialised in financial crime and tax evasion and which was created after the scandal caused by budget minister Jérôme Cahuzac, who Mediapart revealed held a secret tax-evading bank account in Switzerland.
Cahuzac eventually confessed to the scam and resigned in April 2013. In September this year, newly-appointed overseas trade minister Thomas Thévenoud was forced to resign after less than a fortnight in to the job over revelations he had not paid income tax over a period of several years. In April, one of President Hollande's top advisors, Aquilino Morelle, quit his job after Mediapart revealed a conflict of interest when he was a senior government inspector.
In a statement sent on Friday to French press agency Agence France-Presse (AFP), Arif confirmed he was implicated in the PNF investigation, and said he had resigned “out of respect for the ministerial function”, adding that “this decision is also the expression of my total loyalty to the [French] president and to the prime minister”.
A longstanding leader of the Socialist Party’s regional section in the Haute-Garonne département (county) of south-west France, Arif, 54, has for many years been a close ally of President François Hollande. He was one of the leading members of the so-called ‘3% Club’ within the Socialist Party which supported and helped prepare Hollande’s bid to become its presidential candidate at a time when the latter was considered a minor outsider among the potential candidates.
Arif, who until his appointment by Hollande as war veterans minister in May 2012 was for eight years a Member of the European Parliament for the south-west region, has never sat on the regional council. However, he has held a number of local council posts in the Haute-Garonne département that sits in the Midi-Pyrénées region, and from 1999 to 2008 he was leader of the local Socialist Party federation.
The socialist president of the Midi-Pyrénées regional council, Martin Malvy, 78, a socialist doyen, former budget minister, has denounced “a campaign of denigration” by the conservative and centre-right opposition group. In his first statement on the matter, issued in September after the announcement of the opening of an investigation, he said Arif had never been involved “directly nor indirectly” in commercial contracts issued by the council and added that the contracts in question had been the object of widely-publicised tender invitations.
Sources close to the investigation have told Mediapart that the search of Arif’s ministerial offices earlier this month was carried out by the French police anti-corruption squad, the Office central de lutte contre la corruption et les infractions financières et fiscales (OCLCIFF).They focussed on the war veteran ministry’s purchasing office, when they seized a number of documents, apparently to establish whether the ministry had agreed contracts with any of the companies run by Arif’s relatives. Contacted by Mediapart on Thursday before publication of article revealing the police raid, Arif’s office declined to offer any comment.
Arif is the son of an Algerian ‘harki’, the name given to Algerians who fought alongside the French army during the 1954-1962 war of independence. His family fled to France from Algeria at the end of the war, when Arif was three years’ old. “I am totally French, a son of the Republic and at the same time born in Algiers, the son of illiterate Algerians of Muslim culture,” he said in an interview earlier this year with French daily Libération.
Arif’s political career has always been anchored in the Haute-Garonne département, where he grew up and studied at university, notably rising through the ranks after his association with Lionel Jospin, then First Secretary (head) of the Socialist Party who became an MP and general councillor in the south-west region. Jospin, who was appointed as education minister in 1988, when Arif joined his staff, was French prime minister between 1997 and 2002.
Arif’s first major political post came in 1999, when he was elected head of the Haute-Garonne federation of the Socialist Party, which he held until 2008. Meanwhile, in 2002 he became the Socialist Party’s national secretary in charge of international affairs, and between 2005 and 2008, when François Hollande was Socialist Party leader, he served in the key position as the party’s director of regional federations. He was a close ally of Hollande’s throughout the latter’s campaign to become the party’s presidential candidate for 2012.
In 2004 he was elected as an MEP, and was re-elected in 2009. In the June 2012 parliamentary elections he was elected as socialist MP for a constituency in the Haute-Garonne département, which he stood down from to serve his appointment as Minister for War Veterans in the newly-elected socialist government, holding the post continuously until now despite two government reshuffles.
Following his resignation, he could now return to his elected position of MP.
Socialist Party spokeswoman Corinne Narassiguin said on Friday his resignation was “logical regarding the culture of transparency desired by François Hollande”.
“It’s a good thing that he can explain himself without that interfering with the work of the government,” she added.
“No-one is above the law in France,” commented socialist MP Alexis Bachelay. “The justice authorities are doing their job. The resignation of Kader Arif is the ‘exemplary republic’,” he added, in a reference to a catchphrase used by Hollande in his pledge to bring probity to French public office.
“Arif was in government for the simple reason that he was Hollande’s handyman who rendered services for 15 years,” said one socialist MP close to the Left of the party, who did not want to be named. “We won’t cry for him nor regret him.”
Arif is replaced by socialist Senator Jean-Marc Todeschini. In November 2011, Mediapart revealed how he had hired his daughter as his parliamentary assistant, one of about 60 Senators who had placed members of their own family on the parliamentary payroll.
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- The French text of this article can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse