The billionaire industrialist and senator Serge Dassault has withdrawn his appeal against a court judgement that backed Mediapart's decision to publish details of a secretly-recorded conversation involving him. In the recording, which provided the basis for a Mediapart story published in September 2013, Dassault appears to admit to paying out large sums of cash to secure victory for a favoured candidate at a local election in the town of Corbeil-Essonnes, south-west of Paris. The tape was made clandestinely by visitors who had gone to Dassault's office to complain that they had not received their share of the handouts.
After the publication of the story Dassault's lawyers took Mediapart to court, demanding that the contents of the tapes be censored on the ground that their publication was an invasion of his privacy. However, the industrialist, who is chairman and chief executive officer of defence and aerospace group the Dassault Group, did not bring an action for defamation contesting the facts of the revelations.
In October 2013 a Paris court threw out Dassault's attempt to censor the story and last Wednesday, February 25th, 2015, at 1.30pm the court of appeal in Paris was due to consider his appeal against that verdict. However, the senator's lawyers, Jean Veil and Pierre Haïk, informed the court that they were withdrawing the appeal lodged against the original judgement. This decision, for which Dassault and his lawyers are under no obligation to give reasons (see the copy of the motion to withdraw the appeal here), has two consequences.
The first consequence is that it means the ruling at first instance justifying Mediapart's publication of the story stands as a definitive judgement, completely vindicating the arguments of Mediapart's lawyers Jean-Pierre Mignard and Emmanuel Tordjman about the legitimacy of the news story. The second consequence is that it renders even more absurd legally the judicial censorship of which Mediapart was a victim over the publication of content from tapes in the Bettencourt affair. Mediapart is now taking that case to the European Court of Human Rights.
For the initial judgement in the Dassault case, which now stands unopposed, establishes a jurisprudence that is completely contrary to that invoked by France's top appeal court – the Court of Cassation – which found against Mediapart over the revelation of details in the Bettencourt tapes. In some ways the ruling in the Dassault case, made by the seventeenth criminal chamber of the Paris court, puts French justice back on the rails, bringing it in line with the liberal spirit of the 1881 press law. This judgement weighs the public interest of information against its potentially unlawful origins, and does not use the latter as a pretext to ignore the former to ride roughshod over the fundamental right to information.
Here is the full text of that October 2013 judgement (in French only) that dismissed all of Serge Dassault's demands and which today he no longer intends to oppose:
It was on 15 September 15th, 2015, that Mediapart published the first part of an ongoing investigation into the Dassault 'system' of managing elections in the town of Corbeil-Essonnes. That article by Fabrice Arfi, Michaël Hajdenberg and Pascale Pascariello revealed three extracts from a conversation in November 2012 at the town hall in Corbeil between the senator – who is a member of the right-wing UMP party – and two other men. Those two men had come to see Dassault to complain that one of the key players in the 'Dassault System' had not shared out the 1.7 million euros he had been given. This money had been intended to ensure that in the 2010 elections the mayoral candidate supported by Dassault, Jean-Pierre Bechter, won the support and votes of working class areas in Corbeil. Dassault had himself been mayor of the town from 1995 to 2008.
In a second article one of the former protagonists in the 'system' explained how the meeting with Dassault was simply a pretext to try and obtain confirmation of the electoral corruption from the industrialist's own mouth and thus break down the wall of silence that surrounds the 'system'. Unaware that he was being recorded by a hidden camera, Dassault, who owns the national right-wing newspaper Le Figaro, made comments that leave no room for doubt, confirming his personal implication in the carrying out of unlawful acts and of his clear awareness of their illegal nature.
“There, I can't give any more,” says Serge Dassault on the tape. “I can no longer get anything out, it's banned...I'm being watched. I'm under surveillance by the police … The money has been handed out, all of it. Me, I gave the money. I can no longer give a penny to anybody. I can no longer get out money for anybody. There's no more Lebanon. There's no longer anyone over there, it's over. Me, I gave the money … If it's been badly distributed, that's not my fault,” he continues. “I'm not going to pay twice. Me, I've paid everything, so I'm not giving a penny more to anybody. If it's Younès [editor's note, the man who allegedly did not hand out the money as planned], sort it out with him. Me, I can't do anything.”
It is hardly necessary to underline the extent to which this scene raises questions about the morality of public life in France, involving as it does one of its central figures: the head of a press group and someone who has been a local and national elected representative since 1983 – in other words for nearly 32 years. Above all he is an industrialist supported by the public authorities and with taxpayers' money in a sector, armaments, in which many different affairs have show the extent to which he is at the heart of the corrupt practices that are concealed in the shadows of our Republic. In fact, during the judicial investigation that is under way into election corruption in Corbeil-Essonnes, Serge Dassault's accountant told investigators at the end of 2014 that he had handed over a total of 53 million euros in cash to the industrialist between 1995 and 2013, money transferred from banks based in Liechtenstein, Luxembourg and Switzerland.
The Dassault ruling versus the Bettencourt ruling
Over and above the Dassault case itself, this new development reinforces the freedom of the press which was sorely abused by the Court of Cassation in the Bettencourt affair. Overruling decisions made at first instance, then on appeal in the summer of 2010, that had upheld the lawfulness of Mediapart revealing content from tapes made by the Bettencourt's butler on the grounds that it was information in the public interest, the top appeal court stubbornly opposed this view. It considered that, because the recordings had been made illegally, their contents could under no circumstances be revealed. Anyone can see how this reasoning, which shows disdain for all jurisprudence on press rights, is judicially absurd, as those same unlawful recordings have been accepted as evidence by the justice system itself. To the point that they are being broadcast publicly – and sometimes more of the content is being heard than Mediapart chose to reveal – in the current Bettencourt trial in Bordeaux.
Serge Dassault, even though he is the owner of an influential newspaper group, had thus sought to obtain a repeat, pure and simple, of this absurd Bettencourt jurisprudence which we very much hope will be struck down by the ECHR in Strasbourg. Yet it was on this very terrain that the industrialist lost judicially, and which he does not now intend to fight after withdrawing his appeal. In using the pretext of an attack on his private life, because of the clandestine nature of the way these devastating recordings were made, Dassault's lawyers were engaged in an abuse of process which damaged the right of journalists to defend themselves.
Serge Dassault, who did not take action for defamation over the publication of the recordings, in no way contested the content of the comments themselves. Indeed, had he done so the recordings would obviously have been accepted as evidence of the truth of our revelations and of the good faith of our investigation, just as the Bettencourt recordings have been admitted as evidence by the justice system in Bordeaux. A desire to censure them on the pretext of their origins and independent of all debate on the nature of their revelations – important information in the public interest arising from journalistic investigation – is clearly a desire to kill the evidence, and thus deprive the press of an essential means of defence and the public of just as essential information.
In dismissing all of Serge Dassault's claims and ordering him, moreover, to pay us 4,000 euros under article 700 of the civil procedure code, the judgement at first instance in 2013 found in favour of our arguments and explicitly based its reasoning on the grounds of press rights. In place of the blindness shown by the appeal court in Versailles in the Bettencourt case – whose ruling against Mediapart was upheld by the Court of Cassation – which rejected all debate on the content and thus the legitimacy of our information, the court in Paris, as it had done in 2010 in the original ruling on the Bettencourt tapes which was in Mediapart's favour, had instead placed emphasis on “the interest that is attached to the informing of the public about questions of general interest”. In fact, so greatly does the court's ruling underline the importance of the public interest – and thus the gravity – of the facts revealed by the contents of the recordings, that it sounds somewhat like an indictment.
“It is not contestable,” the court magistrates said in their ruling, “that the [Mediapart] article, relative to the role that may have been played by Monsieur Dassault, a major industrial figure, head of a media organization, Senator and [former] mayor of Corbeil-Essonnes from 1995 to 2008, in the establishing of a system of ‘vote buying’ to ensure the election of someone close to him as successor to head the town hall, raises several significant questions of general interest which go beyond, given the personality of the plaintiff and the nature of the practices involved, the local electoral issues alone and place in doubt public probity, the sincerity of the vote, the relations between elected representatives and citizens, and diverse questions about the social relations in certain French municipalities.”
Underlining that Serge Dassault “does not challenge the authenticity of the recording nor the reality of the words uttered by him,” the magistrates stressed “that he refers to the illegality of the deposit of funds and the impossibility of [further] withdrawals of them because of the surveillance ‘by the police’ […] the fact itself that these words were said certainly constitutes a precise piece of information in relation to the issues of general interest concerned by the article […] so much so that a copy of the three contentious extracts was handed over by Mediapart to the police, at the demand of the investigators charged with the 'electoral corruption' affair at Corbeil-Essonnes.”
The court concluded that the written and sound-recorded quotes published by Mediapart “are not in any way related to the private life of Monsieur Dassault”. What’s more, the magistrates found that “the conditions in which they were recorded, during 24 minutes, in an office of the Corbeil-Essonnes town hall, by people having obtained an appointment who sought, according to the plaintiff, to extort funds from him, were not of a nature to allow revelations of matters concerning the private life of the plaintiff”.
Following the deviation from its rightful path witnessed in the Bettencourt affair, French justice has returned to upholding the protection of the right to know with its decision in the Dassault case - a case which is far from being over.
In the meantime the French ministry of defence has become a travelling salesman for the benefit of the billionaire senator, assisting, with some zeal and with the help of public money, the sale of the Dassault-made Rafale fighter aircraft to foreign countries, among them the current regime in Egypt which is more dictatorial than democratic. The Dassault affair is proof, if further proof were needed, that amorality in foreign policy always ends by poisoning domestic politics, corrupting public virtue to the point of this crime against democracy: that of buying votes.
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- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter