Up until now Vincent Bolloré had seemed untouchable. But on April 25th, 2018, the Frenchman whose business empire has strong roots in Africa was placed under formal investigation by French judges Serge Tournaire and Aude Buresi over allegations of corruption of foreign officials, complicity in breach of trust and forgery and the use of false instruments. The tycoon and several of his group's executives had been questioned in custody the previous day as part of the investigation, which relates to how the concessions to run the West African ports of Lomé in Togo and Conakry in Guinea were awarded in 2009 and 2010 respectively.
In a statement the Bolloré Group strongly denied that its former subsidiary involved in the allegations, SDV Africa, had done anything wrong or that its communications arm had acted improperly. “SDV Africa did not engage in any illegal actions and the Bolloré Group reaffirms that these communication services were conducted in full transparency,' it said.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
However, the affair seems to have been taken seriously enough to have hastened a mini change of leadership at the group, which took place before the judicial questioning occurred. Although Vincent Bolloré has insisted for years that he would give up the helm of the group in 2022, when he will be 70, the businessman decided last week to relinquish positions in the most emblematic parts of his group: satellite channel Canal+ and mass media conglomerate Vivendi. At his communications group's annual general meeting on April 19th Vincent Bolloré confirmed that he was standing down as chairman of Canal+ and handing over to Maxime Saada, and announced that his son Yannick Bolloré would take over as chairman of Vivendi. According to the group there is no link between the events and Vincent Bolloré had simply achieved all his aims at Vivendi.
But it is not just Vincent Bolloré who is taking this judicial affair seriously. Behind this businessman lies a significant section of what is known as 'Françafrique', that network of political, economic and military ties between France and her former Africa colonies of which Bolloré has been a part and which could now see its practices shaken up. It is a system which, while never abandoned by any French president, was practised in its most extreme form under the 2007 to 2012 presidency of Nicolas Sarkozy. “It was open season at the time,” to use the expression of an investigator who has worked on the Bolloré case.
The placing of Bolloré under formal investigation – which is one step short of charges being brought – stems from a probe sparked by two formal complaints. The first was made by the French group Necotrans in March 2011 after it was evicted from the port at Conakry by the military and summarily replaced there by the Bolloré group. The second complaint was deposed by Jacques Dupuydauby. He is a former business partner of Vincent Bolloré – in particular during the aborted raid on the Bouygues group in 1998 – who became his partner in the Progasa group before becoming a sworn enemy. Jacques Dupuydauby blames Vincent Bolloré for having deprived him of the concessionary rights at Lomé's port in 2009, which he had held since 2001.
Following the complaints there was an investigation, which included a search of the Bolloré group's office's in April 2016. The examining magistrates, led by Judge Serge Tournaire, suspect the group's executives of using its communications subsidiary, Havas, to help African leaders to get elected by providing them with advice that was under-billed or in some cases not billed at all. In Guinea's case the politician concerned was Alpha Condé.
The claim is that in return these leaders then ripped up their countries' existing agreements on port concessions and handed them to the Bolloré group. That was the suspicion raised by Necotrans's lawyer Pierre-Olivier Sur after the expulsion of his client from Conakry. “We hope that the justice system investigates the fact that Bolloré supported Alpha Condé through the communications agency Euro RSCG [editor's note, part of Havas], that it controls, and obtained the concession for Conakry port,” he said.
Other leading figures in the Bolloré group were also questioned by judges this week. Gilles Alix, one of the directors at Vinvendi, who for years has dealt with transport and logistics for the Bolloré group, mostly in Africa, was placed under investigation for corruption of foreign officials, complicity in breach of trust and forgery and use of false instruments. Jean-Philippe Dorent, in charge of the international department at Havas, and another who has spent a great deal of time in Africa, was placed under the status of 'assisted witness' in relation to the corruption of foreign officials, and placed under investigation in relation to complicity in breach of trust and forgery and use of false instruments. However, Francis Perez, an executive at the a leisure and gaming company Pefaco group, who is close to Jean-Philip Dorent, and who was also questioned, left custody facing no investigation.
In his virtually annual interview in the publication Jeune Afrique, Vincent Bolloré never misses a chance to remind people of his attachment to the continent. “I love Africa,” he says. Indeed, it is to Africa that he owes his fortune. In the mid-1980s, at a time when the French business world turned away from Africa, Bolloré started buying up the last business vestiges of colonialism that still survived. These companies included SCAC, involved in logistics and distribution, in 1986; Delmas-Vieljeux, a maritime transport company, in 1992; logistics firm Saga in 1998 and in particular Rivaud, which was involved in plantations, banks and finance, in 1996. With the help of President Jacques Chirac's former key aide Michel Roussin, and Jacques Rossi, formerly of Clinvest, Crédit Lyonnais's investment bank, Bolloré was building an empire in Africa, while scarcely changing the old colonial practices. African heads of state, and also a number of French presidents and sections of French diplomacy, were in his debt.
For Vincent Bolloré knew how to make himself indispensable. From the end of the 1990s the businessman decided to abandon maritime transport on the grounds that it was too expensive and too risky. Instead he concentrated his African activities in better paying and more fundamental sectors: logistics, transport infrastructure and in particular ports. To have concessions in the ports meant having having some control of a country's economy and thus its government.
A port empire
Vincent Bolloré steadily increased his influence, port by port. In 2004 he won control of the port at Abidjan in the Ivory Coast in circumstances such that the World Bank, which handled the bid process, disputed the outcome. He continued with Libreville and Owendo in Gabon, Douala in Cameroon, Brazzaville in the Congo and so on. There were 16 in total.
The only setback was the loss of Dakar in Senegal. Though the SCAC had held the concession for what is one of Africa's biggest ports since 1926, the Bolloré group lost control to the Dubai Investment Authority in 2007. Vincent Bolloré was not prepared to forget this affront, and still less so was President Sarkozy who placed the French government at the service of his friend's interests.
Enlargement : Illustration 2
During a meeting with the Togolese president, Faure Gnassingbé, in 2007 President Sarkozy threw all his weight behind the idea that the port of Lomé, for which Jacques Dupuydauby had held the concession since 2001, should go to the Bolloré group. According to the investigative magazine Le Canard enchaîné the French president went so far as to issue threats. The port at Lomé was a concern for the Bolloré group as it provided potential competition for the port at Abidjan.
The pressure was stepped up very quickly, with France having a number of ways of getting its message across. Faure Gnassingbé had succeeded his father Gnassingbé Eyadéma - who died in office - as the result of a constitutional coup. His subsequent election in 2005 was deeply controversial, led to hundreds of deaths, and the outcome was disputed by the United Nations. Few countries were prepared to accept the president's legitimacy, still less to welcome him as a visitor. At the end of 2008, however, Nicolas Sarkozy agreed to receive Gnassingbé at the Élysée. Officially the conversation between the two men concerned the process of democratisation and the opening up of the African country's economy.
But back in Lomé the tone was very different. The Togolese president's middleman, Charles Debbasch, stepped up his demands on Jacques Dupuydauby. Though he had been asking for three million euros in cash on all the goods handled at the port, he now wanted five million, pointing out that the Élysée was demanding that the port be handed to Bolloré. Dupuydauby refused and his fate was sealed.
At the end of May 2009 the Togolese army entered the port, seized all the equipment and archives and removed all the company's employees. Less than 24 hours later the Bolloré group was installed, taking control of all the assets and the accounts – which contained around 24 million euros – and taking over the port concession with no sign of a tender process.
Vincent Bolloré did not stop there. He took legal action in Lomé against his former business partner, accusing him of having misappropriated the port company's assets. Jacques Dupuydauby was given a 20-year prison term for criminal conspiracy and ordered to pay 400 million euros to the Bolloré group. An international arrest warrant was issued for Jacques Dupuydauby. Then, following accusations from the Bolloré group that he had siphoned off assets in Togo and Gabon, Jacques Dupuydauby was convicted again, this time in Spain, and given a prison sentence of three years and nine months. In March 2010 Faure Gnassingbé was re-elected as president of Togo.
Meanwhile in the summer of 2008 the company Necotrans had been chosen over the Bolloré group to run the concession in the port at Conakry in Guinea. However, the political outlook quickly changed when the president Lansana Conté died in December of the same year. A military junta seized power and disputed the management of the port. After a massacre of civilians the military junta lost authority and the support of Western governments, and elections were held in 2010.
Alpha Condé, a leading opposition figure, stood in those elections. He had the backing of Vincent Bolloré and his campaign was run by Euro RSCG Worldwide, part of Havas. In the first round of the vote Condé only received 18% of the vote, trailing well behind his main opponent Cellou Dalein Diallo. But in the second round of voting Condé won with 52% of the vote, an outcome that was disputed.
The new president swiftly took control of his country's key assets, its mines and also the main port at Conakry. On March 8th, 2011, troops burst into the port, removed employees and seized everything in the offices of Getma International, the subsidiary of Necotrans which ran the port. Two days later a new port concession was granted to the Bolloré group for 25 years. Ten days later, on March 22nd, 2011, Nicolas Sarkozy received Alpha Condé at the Élysée amid great pomp and ceremony, in what was the African president's first international visit.
Necotrans took legal action and in the end received three million euros in damages and interest from a court in Nanterre, west of Paris, before going into receivership in the summer of 2017. The Bolloré group then bought up its assets at knock-down prices.
“Attempting to link the attribution of a port concession with communication services translates a great misunderstanding of this economic sector and economic activity in general,” the Bolloré group said in its statement, making clear it was happy to “fully cooperate with the judicial authorities to restore the truth about those facts”. A source close to Bolloré notes: “The group has worked in Africa for 30 years and if it had gone off the straight and narrow it would have been the object of proceedings. Yet up to now it has not be the object of any proceedings.”
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- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter