The small hillside villages of Moltifao and Asco lie in the picturesque mountainous region of north-central Corsica, the French Mediterranean island commonly nicknamed “the island of beauty”, but which is known as much for its fearsome underworld clans as its breath-taking natural scenery.
Earlier this month, vehicles carrying dozens of gendarmes, accompanied by inspectors from the local land management authorities and the agricultural workers’ social security agency, wound their way up to the two villages as part of their investigations into a vast suspected scam involving European Union (EU) agricultural subsidies.
The December 6th operation centred on five lots declared as grazing land for local cattle farmers which received a total of 850,000 euros in agricultural aid subsidies between 2015 and 2019. “We have strong suspicions of irregularity concerning these farms, of which two refused [to be the subject of] controls,” said public prosecutor Caroline Tharot, based in the Bastia, the administrative capital of the Haute-Corse, the island’s northern département (county).
One of those at the centre of the investigation, which is just the latest in a series of probes into alleged agricultural subsidy frauds, is Patrick Costa, 47. His family is closely connected to the “Brise de mer” (“sea breeze”) criminal gang, named after a bar in Bastia where some of its members would meet. Beginning in the late 1970s, the gang dominated organised crime in northern Corsica for more than three decades. Several of its leaders were assassinated, including Maurice Costa, Patrick’s uncle, who was shot dead on August 7th 2012 in a butcher’s shop in Ponte-Leccia, about 12 kilometres south-east of Moltifao, the family fiefdom where Jacques Costa, another uncle of Patrick’s, is mayor.
Also targeted by the investigation is Patrick Costa’s son Pierre-Dominique Costa, a cattle farmer since 2017 (he features in this unrelated February 2018 report by French TV channel TF1). In Corsica, the Costa family – brothers, sisters, cousins, nephews and nieces – are regarded with a respect partly driven by fear due to its mixture of notables and gangsters.
Moltifao’s mayor Jacques Costa, a former vice-president of the Haute-Corse general council, is president of the Corsican regional natural park, a protected rural zone that covers about 40% of the island, and which includes 145 villages that are “communes” (the French term for populated areas with their own local councils). The post carries significant power, with key responsibility for creating jobs, and allotting public funds and projects across the park’s vast rural area in which lies a population of just 27,000.
Dominique Costa, nicknamed “Mimi”, is another of Patrick Costa’s uncles. He recently returned to the village of Moltifao after serving a prison sentence. He is also officially a cattle farmer, and as such received 40,000 euros in EU subsidies for a 12-month period in 2016-2017, and 38,000 euros over the period 2017-2018. However, he has spent more time on the run and in jail over recent years than caring for his bovine herds: since 1997 he has been convicted on four occasions of various crimes, including money laundering, and sentenced in total to 16 years in prison.
In March 2015, several members of the Costa family stood trial in France’s southern port city of Marseille on charges that included money laundering, misuse of company assets, and extorsion. One of the defendants was Jacques Costa, who at the end of the trial was handed a suspended 18-month prison sentence for the misuse of the assets of a company he owned. His brother Dominique, tried in absentia for a separate case of money laundering, was given a four-year prison sentence – he was eventually captured by police the following year and jailed.
In his written argument for sending the defendants for trial, the examining magistrate in charge of the case (and whose investigation was in the framework of a “specialised inter-regional jurisdiction” that is assigned complex cases of organised and financial crime) noted: “The status of tax-exempted cattle rearer of a few dozen heads of livestock, as officially claimed by almost all the members of the Costa family, appears very insufficient as an explanation for the outward signs of wealth on display.”
Since 2015, the otherwise modest earnings from cattle rearing have been significantly boosted by more generous subsidies paid under the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). In the case of Patrick Costa, the subsidies paid to him doubled between 2013 and 2016, rising over this period from and annual 38,000 euros to 87,000 euros.
The new criteria introduced under the CAP allowed farmers in Corsica to declare vast areas of scrubland as grazing areas for their cattle, which typically can be seen roaming around villages and country roads.
Patrick Costa presents himself as also being a cattle farmer, with a bovine herd of 87 animals. In 2018, he declared his pasture land totalled 570 hectares, made up of about 20 plots in several communes of the Haute-Corse département, of which 282 hectares are eligible for CAP subsidies. The land he occupies in Moltifao is rented out to him by the village council, presided over by his uncle Jacques, the mayor. Patrick Costa’s personal partner, his son and two friends also declared large swathes of pasture land for their small herds.
Contacted by Mediapart, Patrick Costa’s lawyer, Jean-André Albertini, declined to be interviewed, but sent the following statement by email. “My client has never refused any kind of inspection, having never been informed of the said control. His status as cattle farmer cannot be placed in question and he holds at disposition for anyone all the justificatory elements that attest this. I add that up until now he has not been notified of any charge in the legal or administrative procedure, and I would not fail to engage action for defamation if necessary.”
In all, the five zones of farmland visited by the inspectors and gendarmes on December 6th were officially declared in 2018 as totalling 1,500 hectares – of which 642 hectares are eligible for CAP subsidies – and used as grazing land for a total of 174 heads of cattle.
On October 9th this year, Patrick Costa and his companion Lucille Guidoni stood trial for fraudulently receiving agricultural subsidies between 2013 and 2015 that were granted by the Corsican office for agricultural development (the ODARC). He was handed an 18-month suspended prison term and fined 10,000 euros, while his companion was given a ten-month suspended prison term and fined 5,000 euros.
Anti-corruption campaigners demand independent probe
While less known in public than his uncles, Patrick Costa is nevertheless well known to the justice system for his links to organised crime. In 2015, he stood trial in Marseille alongside around 30 defendants on charges relating to the trafficking of drugs and arms which were transported in the holds of ferries serving Corsica from mainland France. The business was managed on the island by a group known as the “Master Café gang” which was formed during the 2000s, so-called because of the name of a café they would meet in, situated close to Poretta airport south of Bastia.
Costa was a regular client of the bar. He was arrested in a hired Audi in September 2013 in Bastia’s Saint-Nicolas square, in the company of Christophe Catta, one of cattle farmers targeted in the inspection of land near Moltifao on December 6th.
During their arrest, both men were found to be carrying semi-automatic pistols; Patrick Costa had a Glock 19 handgun, while Catta was armed with a Walter P99. A 12-bore shotgun was also found hidden under a carpet of the front passenger seat.
Christophe Catta, who investigators believed served as a right-hand man for the head of a drug trafficking gang, told police that he worked as a nightclub bouncer, which he said was why he carried a gun, albeit illegally. A search of a room where he lived, at the home of his grandmother, found 6,000 euros in cash.
Patrick Costa told investigators that he had three professional activities; as a cattle farmer, as the manager of a snack bar in Asco, the mountain village close to Moltifao, and as an employee of the Corsican regional nature park which he openly recognised in a statement was “full time on paper but not necessarily on the ground”. At the end of his trial in Marseille, when he was sentenced to two years in prison, one suspended, for illegal possession of a firearm and ammunition, the magistrates’ written ruling, dated July 3rd 2015, said of his job with the regional park: “His chronic absenteeism within this body even prevented his hierarchical superior from assessing his performance”. As for his activity as a cattle farmer, he told investigators that the animals were left free to roam “and they come back in the evening”.
The magistrates dismissed the case against him for drugs and arms trafficking. “No element in the case file allows to establish a link between Patrick Costa and the drugs trafficking of the Master Café crew, nor with what can strictly speaking be called arms trafficking,” the court ruling read.
Meanwhile, Catta was found guilty, in absentia, of associating with criminals with a view to trafficking drugs and for illegal possession of a firearm and ammunition. “Taking into account his idle character, which augurs ill regarding his desire to leave criminality, it is appropriate to sentence him to three years in prison, [because] any other sentence appears unsuitable,” ruled the magistrates, who issued a warrant for his arrest.
Questioned by Mediapart about the December 6th inspection, Catta’s lawyer Damien Benedetti dismissed any suggestion his client was involved in agricultural subsidies fraud. “He’s a socially reintegrated young man who has had no problem with the law since that conviction for what was a youthful indiscretion,” said Benedetti. “He gave the gendarmes the justificatory documents for his 12 cows. He earnestly wants to lead a peaceful life.”
The investigations into the alleged subsidies frauds, moving from family to family, valley by valley, are being led by a criminal investigation branch of the gendarmerie as part of a preliminary probe opened by the prosecution services. Under usual practice, the investigation might have been handed by this stage to an investigating magistrate to lead a full judicial probe, but by keeping its preliminary status the gendarmes are able to work relatively fast.
The investigation into the activities of the Costa family is the latest of several others into the suspected subsidies scams. The first of these was opened in November 2018, targeting Jean-Dominique Rossi, a former head of the agricultural chamber of the southern Corse-du-sud département (the island’s other administrative region, equivalent to a county). That investigation is now completed, and Rossi is due to stand trial in Ajaccio on April 7th 2020 on charges of fraud and money laundering with others, for which he faces, if found guilty, up to ten years in jail.
He is accused of embezzling 1.4 million euros of EU subsidies over a three-year period for the benefit of his family, allegedly made possible by his key position in the local agricultural chamber and his expert knowledge of the administrative procedures for subsidy payments. He denies all the charges against him. While awaiting trial, he has been given conditional bail and banned from exercising his post at the chamber.
Another, ongoing investigation into suspected subsidy scams was opened in April this year and concerns the activities of Jean-Sauveur Vallesi, a cattle rearer who is employed by the Haute-Corse federation of farmers unions, the FDSEA. It is alleged that his farm was fictitiously divided up into separate units managed by himself, his wife and his two sons, and that the family fraudulently declared a vast pasture land of a total of 1,200 hectares for 180 heifers.
But such rapid preliminary investigations are sharply criticised by the lawyers of the accused, who are only able to examine the details of the case once their client has been ordered to stand trial. In the case of full-blown judicial investigations led by an examining magistrate (who has the title of judge), before a suspect may be sent for trial they are placed under investigation, when their legal team has access to the case file. “Normally, for a case of such complexity a judicial investigation is the preferred choice, with a judge who investigates to establish guilt or innocence, in order to uphold the rights of the defence,” said Camille Romani, lawyer for Jean-Dominique Rossi. Romani has applied for the conditional measures of Rossi’s bail to be removed and for the freezing of the family’s agricultural and property assets to be lifted.
The nature of the preliminary investigations has also come in for criticism from anti-corruption NGO Anticor, which underlines the lack of independence of the prosecution services from the political powers, in this case the prosecutors in Ajaccio and Bastia. In France, the prosecution services are hierarchically subservient to the justice ministry, and can therefore receive orders from the justice minister. An examining magistrate – the judges who lead serious criminal cases – is in theory totally independent in their decision-making, although administratively attached to the justice ministry.
“Our wish is for an examining magistrate to be appointed to investigate, more widely, the whole system of fraud, including any eventual complicity within the state apparatus,” said Jérôme Karsenti, lawyer for Anticor. “There is reason to investigate as much those who benefit from the subsidies as the authorities who control the attribution of aid, whose failings appear to us to be blatant. All the facts must be investigated outside of any geographical or institutional pressure.”
With that aim, Anticor earlier this year filed a formal complaint with the senior examining magistrate of the financial crimes branch of investigating judges in Paris, citing “massive embezzlement of European subsides in Corsica”. The complaint was filed on May 15th 2019, but Anticor has received no further news since.
However, the issue is clearly an urgent one. The European Anti-Fraud Office (more often known by its French-language acronym, OLAF), which is the European Commission’s arm for investigating fraud of the EU budget or within the bloc’s institutions, has recently sent a team of inspectors to Corsica to evaluate the system of management and control of agricultural subsidies.
In an interview with French news agency AFP, the regional prefect for Corsica, Josiane Chevalier, said that among the declarations made by farmers in Corsica detailing the surface area of their agricultural land, 40% presented anomalies, compared with 10% of declarations by farmers on mainland France. The EU has demanded that the French authorities now carry out verifications of 650 farms in Corsica on top of the 200 already planned this year.
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- The French version of this report can be found here.