It is an explosive case for the French justice system, involving a senior prosecutor who was a key figure in the country's anti-corruption drive.
A series of phone taps have revealed some murky practices that occurred when prosecutor Éliane Houlette was head of France's financial crimes prosecution unit the Parquet National Financier (PNF). The phone taps were carried out in 2019 by detectives investigating a case of alleged misappropriation of public funds at city hall in Marseille, a case overseen by the PNF, Mediapart can reveal.
The transcripts of these calls led to two highly embarrassing reports by detectives from the Section de Recherches (SR) or criminal investigation department of the gendarmerie in Marseille.
The gendarmes' reports indicate that there were leaks about an ongoing investigation to the people who were the subject of that probe; in this case, close associates of the right-wing mayor of Marseille, Jean-Claude Gaudin. The detectives also highlighted possible secret arrangements with the head of the PNF to try to limit the scope of an investigation that was likely to be a severe legal blow to the mayor as well as his closest aide.
“These activities could thus likely establish the offence of influence peddling,” the Marseille gendarmes wrote in a summary report about Éliane Houlette on July 12th 2019.
The gendarmes' reports prompted the Paris prosecutor to call for a preliminary investigation into Éliane Houlette over allegations of “influence peddling”, “collusion” and “breach of confidentiality”.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
Eventually a preliminary investigation was launched, into an alleged “breach” of the rule of secrecy in ongoing criminal investigations.
But since the opening of that probe in September 2019 – nine months ago – the case has drifted from one court jurisdiction to another, from Paris to the west Paris suburb of Nanterre, without making any apparent progress. “It's a real hot potato for the legal system,” said one person with knowledge of the dossier who asked to stay anonymous because of the confidentiality rules attached to such investigations.
The case puts into context the recent controversy caused by comments Éliane Houlette made to Members of Parliament at the National Assembly earlier this month. The former head of the PNF – she stood down at the end of June 2019 - told MPs of the alleged “pressures” she had come under over the investigation into former prime minister and 2017 presidential election candidate François Fillon from her superior, the Paris prosecutor Catherine Champrenault. In other words, the same person who in 2019 had called for the preliminary investigation into Éliane Houlette.
Now, based on the phone taps in Marseille, the gendarmes' reports on them and the views of several informed legal sources, it looks as if the bigger potential scandal for the PNF might be one concerning Éliane Houlette.
This is the summary of the case so far.
- I. The 'friend' turned out to be the prosecutor
The story in Marseille started in the autumn of 2017, when prosecutors at the Parquet National Financier (PNF) took over a preliminary investigation opened by the prosecution service in Marseille into an alleged working hours scam involving officials at city hall in Marseille. It involved claims of a false counting system at the city's own ambulance service which allowed some employees to inflate the number of hours they worked.
After gendarmes began investigating it emerged that other city hall services were indulging in similar practices. As a result the case was handed to the PNF who carried out searches in January 2018. Several city hall bosses were then hauled in for questioning, including the mayor Jean-Claude Gaudin, who represents the right-wing Les Républicains party, and his chief of staff Claude Bertrand in July of that year.
By the autumn of 2018 the investigation had almost been completed. And on September 28th gendarmes from the Section de Recherches (SR) went to Paris for a working meeting with the PNF.
The detectives from the SR explained that during the searches at city hall they had discovered a new affair; that Jean-Claude Gaudin's inner circle, some fifteen or so people, were working illegally as they had passed the legal age fixed by the code relating to public sector workers. There was also a suspicion that 'bogus jobs' had been created, in particular in relation to chief of staff Claude Bertrand who seemed to spend very little time working in his second position as parliamentary attaché to Jean-Claude Gaudin, who was a senator as well as mayor of Marseille.
So at the end of November 2018 the PNF opened a second preliminary investigation, this time for “misappropriation of public funds”, a case dubbed the “elderly employees affair”.
On May 14th 2019 the PNF triggered a new wave of searches at city hall in the Mediterranean city. The website Marsactu revealed that the new searches were connected with suspicions about the jobs of the “old guard” who made up the mayor's inner circle, and that chief of staff Claude Bertrand, who has considerable influence in the city authority, was personally suspected of benefiting from a fake job.
Panic ensued at city hall. With Bertrand's name appearing in the press, the Gaudin clan felt directly threatened and feared the investigation could implicate the mayor himself.
The Gaudin clan was right to be worried. In a summary report the gendarmes concluded that their investigation had enabled them to “establish” the “knowledge” of the mayor himself of criminal acts. “These situations [editor's note, of illegal jobs] are the consequence of commitments taken by the organiser in the person of Mr Jean-Claude Gaudin in his capacity as mayor,” wrote the gendarmes, who referred to “substantial harm” caused to the local authority and highlighted the central role of Gaudin's chief of staff who was “particularly involved”.
But inside the mayor's own inner circle itself no one knew anything at this stage. They were desperately short of information; as the two investigations were still preliminary – in other words, under the sole control of the prosecution – lawyers did not have access to the files.
The mayor's closes aides counted just on the help of a seasoned lawyer, the Marseille criminal law specialist Jean-Jacques Campana, who is Claude Bertrand's legal counsel. He spoke regularly on the phone with another city hall executive cited in the two affairs, the deputy director general for services Jean-Pierre Chanal. On the phone Chanal calls Campana “ you, our lawyer”. He was referring to him not just as Bertrand's lawyer but as a lawyer for the whole group.
Unbeknown to him, Jean-Pierre Chanal's phone had been tapped by the SR's detectives who then went on to make a series of astonishing discoveries.
At half-past midnight on May 17th 2019 lawyer Jean-Jacques Campana called Jean-Pierre Chanal. The latter then called Claude Bertrand the following morning at 9.19am to relay the conversation. The lawyer had told him that he had had a meeting that very day, at 4.30pm, in the office of a mysterious woman “friend” in order to “look together at the pages of the document”. Chanal said that the lawyer would report back “this evening” once he had returned home to Marseille.
The mayor's chief of staff, Bertrand, was worried about the significance of recent events, probably referring to the searches carried out five days earlier. Jean-Pierre Chanal reassured him: Jean-Jacques Campana's source had “told” him that the new judicial proceedings were just “incidental” and would not change the general “outline” of things.
The gendarmes listening to this conversation did not yet know it at this stage, but Jean-Jacques Campana's “friend” was none other than the head of the PNF, Éliane Houlette.
The senior prosecutor and the lawyer are indeed friends. And Mediapart has been able to check that Éliane Houlette did indeed meet Jean-Jacques Campana in secret on May 17th 2019 in her office at the PNF in rue des Italiens in Paris without any other prosecutor being informed.
When contacted by Mediapart ex-prosecutor Éliane Houlette – who is today a member of the gambling regulatory body the Autorité Nationale des Jeux – declined to reply to our questions. “Madame Houlette is following my advice which is not to reply to questions which appear to me to be so absurd that they've become embarrassing,” said her lawyer Jean-Pierre Versini-Campinchi (the full response, in French, can be read here in the section More).
- II. The Objective? To discover the content of the dossiers
One week after this meeting mayor Jean-Claude Gaudin's senior staff came up with a plan. They were under pressure in the “elderly jobs” legal case. And that pressure had increased after the regional audit body, the Chambre Régionale des Comptes (CRC), had sent a highly damaging preliminary report on the same issue to city hall on May 22nd 2019. This referred to the “illegal situation” of several employees who had passed the age limit, including the chief of staff himself Claude Bertrand (see the final report here).
Behind the scenes several senior figures at city hall, including Bertrand and Jean-Pierre Chanal, were hastily working to end the contracts of the most problematic cases, with the exception of the chief of staff's own contract.
Enlargement : Illustration 2
The decision was then made to send two letters, each to be signed by Jean-Claude Gaudin. The first was a response to the regional audit commission, stating that the authority had put its house in order. The second, on the same issue, was to be addressed to the boss of the PNF, Éliane Houlette.
However, according to several eavesdropped phone conversations the aim of the second letter was less about convincing the PNF and more about seeking a pretext for a further meeting between lawyer Jean-Jacques Campana and Éliane Houlette.
On May 25th 2019 Jean-Pierre Chanal called the lawyer to tell him that he would have to send the letter from Jean-Claude Gaudin to “the lady”. Chanal explained to the lawyer that he could no longer simply have a fortuitous friendship with “the lady” and just go on seeing her on the “basis of friendship”. Jean-Jacques Campana agreed with the reasoning; sending the “letter” would give him a good excuse to see her.
A week later, on June 2nd, Chanal called Campana at 8.29pm to tell him that Claude Bertrand wanted to sort out the legal issues and examine all the cases together. The lawyer replied that he had no news but that he was going to call “Éliane” to speak to her about the letter.
Chanal called Campana again the next morning at 8.27am. He told the lawyer that a few days earlier the PNF had carried out searches at the Senate in Paris as part of the investigation into suspicions that Claude Bertrand's employment as Gaudin's parliamentary assistant amounted to a fake job. The prosecutors were “doing a Mrs Fillon” on him, said Chanal, a reference to the charges against former prime minister François Fillon that though his wife Penelope was formally employed as his parliamentary assistant she had never actually performed those duties.
Jean-Jacques Campana then told Chanal that he had spoken to Éliane Houlette on the phone the evening before, Sunday June 2nd, at 9.30pm. The lawyer said the prosecutor had confirmed to him the information that she had given him “fifteen days ago”, a date that corresponds to the meeting on May 17th. This information was that the first investigation into the fake jobs of officials in the city had “ended” and that there was barely any incriminating evidence in the second probe, involving Jean-Claude Gaudin's colleagues. The lawyer said on the phone: “She told me: 'As far as I'm concerned there's nothing'.”
Campana added that the PNF boss told him that she was soon going to get an update from one of her assistant prosecutors who dealt with cases in Marseille but that her subordinate had not at that stage alerted her to anything else.
The veteran lawyer said that he had raised with Éliane Houlette the issue of the letter that he wanted to send her, to which he said she had replied “why not”. Chanal responded: “We're ready, you tell me and I'll bring you the letter.” He made it clear he wanted to wrap up the operation before Éliane Houlette left her post as the head of the PNF on the evening of June 28th. “The 29th, that's just around the corner,” Chanal told the lawyer.
During this same phone conversation on June 3rd lawyer Jean-Jacques Campana told Chanal that his friend had told him that it would be better to call her in the evening that week as she would be very busy with several PNF cases. “She told me that this week … they are doing Lyon … there's Lyon and [former justice minister, Rachida] Dati this weekend … [former interior minister and mayor of Lyon, Gérard] Collomb … Rachida Dati and Alain Bauer,” the lawyer told Chanal.
On June 5th the two men spoke again on the phone and joked that this information had been perfectly accurate. For the press had just announced that on the same morning searches had started at city hall in Lyon as well as at the home of Lyon mayor Gérard Collomb, in a case involving the employment of his ex-wife by the city authorities. And the day before Marianne magazine had revealed that the PNF had started an investigation concerning the former justice minister and current mayor of the VIIth arrondissement or district in Paris, Rachida Dati, of the right-wing Les Républicains, and the security consultant Alain Bauer. This concerned fees they received from car makers Renault-Nissan.
But there was a problem with the “letter” which was supposed to give lawyer Jean-Jacques Campana the pretext to meet Éliane Houlette without raising suspicion. At 9.12am on that same day, June 5th 2019, Jean-Pierre Chanal spoke on the phone with the city's director of legal affairs Marie-Sylviane Dole.
Marie-Sylviane Dole explained that she had identified a problem after a discussion with Jacqueline Faglin, a retired judge who oversaw the city's ethical code. As Jean-Jacques Campana was not city hall's lawyer it would be difficult for him to to send a letter from the mayor to Éliane Houlette. The legal director feared the likely reaction of the PNF boss's “minions”.
Ten minutes later Chanal called Jean-Jacques Campana again to explain the problem to him, stating that he must make sure that the “lady's colleagues” asked no questions about his status. This clearly implied that the scheming was taking place behind the backs of the prosecutors who were dealing directly with the Marseille case. Jean-Pierre Chanal told the lawyer that, despite this, he could perhaps get a meeting with the “lady” the following week, starting Monday June 10th.
On the same day, June 5th, Chanal made yet another call, this time to the director of human resources department at city hall, Yves Rusconi; he wanted the Gaudin letter to be ready quickly so that he could give it to Jean-Jacques Campana during a planned meeting on June 7th. On that day Chanal called Claude Bertrand, telling the chief of staff that the mayor had to sign the letter to “Éliane” as a matter of urgency.
- III. Phone-tap content passed up the legal hierarchy
The phone taps in early June 2019 made it clear to the gendarmes in Marseille that lawyer Jean-Jacques Campana's “friend” was indeed PNF boss Éliane Houlette. At the request of the assistant prosecutors at the PNF in charge of the Marseille case, the detectives then drew up a summary report on the phone-tapped conversations relating to Éliane Houlette. They sent it to the prosecutors on June 10th 2019.
The next day the two assistant prosecutors sent a report to the Paris prosecutor Catherine Champrenault, who was Éliane Houlette's immediate boss. When questioned by Mediapart the two assistant prosecutors declined to comment, citing rules of professional secrecy.
Within hours of the prosecutors sending her the report, Catherine Champrenault summoned Éliane Houlette to her office.
Enlargement : Illustration 3
Later, on June 14th, the Paris prosecutor referred the matter to the legal services unit at the Ministry of Justice for a disciplinary probe into Éliane Houlette as the “facts were likely to relate to a breach of ethics”, according to the prosecution service (read their full response, in French, under the tab More). Catherine Champrenault, who kept hold of the original of the Houlette file, was also in contact with the senior assistant prosecutor at the PNF, Jean-Luc Blachon, who had a copy of the same file. Houlette's subordinate – he was made up to deputy prosecutor and thus number 2 at the PNF on July 8th 2019 – then had to deal administratively with the case at the PNF and formally close it, as it was already the subject of disciplinary proceedings. That was done on June 28th.
“The filing away of this copy of the official report was just an internal administrative formality and any other interpretation of this process would be incorrect,” Jean-Luc Blachon told Mediapart (see his full response, in French, under the heading More). “There was never any question of me taking any decision in the affair concerning Madame Houlette. No criminal investigation was thus undertaken and still less closed by the PNF, which could obviously not legitimately deal with such a case.”
Meanwhile, back in Marseille Jean-Claude Gaudin's colleagues were unaware of Éliane Houlette's problems. That is why lawyer Jean-Jacques Campana could not understand why the prosecutor seemed to be keeping her distance from him. On June 21st someone close to the lawyer said during a phone conversation that Campana had tried to phone Éliane Houlette three days earlier and that she was supposed to be calling him back. This same person said that the physical meeting to hand over the “letter” to the prosecutor had still not taken place but they thought that the letter had been sent to her.
- IV. Behind the scenes of a pact to protect mayor Gaudin
The crucial day, June 28th, arrived when Éliane Houlette was standing down as head of the PNF. But the prosecutor, whose mandate ended that evening, was no longer responding to calls. Gaudin's allies veered between incomprehension and anger. Meanwhile during phone conversations they revealed the true aim behind operation Houlette.
The city's deputy director general of services, Jean-Pierre Chanal, told lawyer Jean-Jacques Campana that Éliane Houlette had made commitments and was due to send letters to “three or four” people. Jean-Jacques Campana replied that only three letters mattered because “there's one person I really don't care about”.
The gendarmes who were carrying out the investigation wrote in their report that these “commitments” by Houlette seemed to involve the “investigation conducted by the PNF into working hours in the municipal services in Marseille”.
Was the plan for the PNF to send just some of the executives who were under suspicion for trial, or to offer them a deal on a guilty plea, in order to preserve the mayor and his chief of staff? In one of the phone taps Jean-Pierre Chanal laughed as he told Campana: “I must surely be the first guy in the world who's waiting impatiently to be sent to court.”
But whatever the the plan was, it was in the process of collapsing. At 12.19pm on June 28th Jean-Jacques Campana informed Jean-Pierre Chanal that he had tried to contact Éliane Houlette on several occasions but without success.
The conversation between the two men then went as follows:
Chanal: “She's leaving there this evening … she won't have any more letters to sign afterwards.”
Campana: “She's still got years left in her … She said what she said! Now it has to be put in place.”
Chanal: “Quite frankly, don't bother about it. I've come to terms with it… and some time ago, as it's such a long time since she told you that. I think that if she hasn't done it, it's either because she can't do it or because she doesn't want to do it, and that she's very embarrassed … you reach a point when there's no point in being unkind, it doesn't help things move forward.”
Campana: “No! There's no point but, it makes you think. She's got several hours to do what she had said. There you have it!”
At 6.17pm Jean-Pierre Chanal called Claude Bertrand, the mayor's chief of staff, to tell him about his latest conversation with Jean-Jacques Campana. “I told him 'Well, listen, if I understand it, having had a meeting on All Saints' Day, then Christmas, then now June, I suppose that we'll just receive some information in the month of January/February. Just before the elections [editor's note, the local elections in March 2020].' He said to me 'Listen, I've been looking for her for three, four days, and I haven't managed to get hold of her, and that's starting to annoy me because it's either incompetence or taking the piss'.”
Chanal, the city's deputy director general, was very pessimistic. “One can imagine that there were a certain number of letters or things that she might have had on this afternoon and that she'll tell him that. But, in the end, well! Let's stop dreaming,” he said to Claude Bertrand.
When contacted by Mediapart Jean-Jacques Campana, Jean-Claude Gaudin, Claude Bertrand and Jean-Pierre Chanal all declined to comment.
On July 12th 2019 the gendarmes who had been attentively listening to these phone conversations wrote a second report about Éliane Houlette to the investigative judge Cécile Meyer-Fabre. She had just taken on the “elderly employees” case following the launch of a full investigation.
In the report the gendarmes noted that the new phone taps “explicitly show contacts and commitments undertaken since at least September 2018”. While their nature “remains unknown”, these possible commitments by Éliane Houlette “seem to be related to the legal developments of proceedings which the service she was heading had responsibility for”. They concluded: “These activities could thus likely establish the offence of influence peddling.”
The information was sent to the Paris prosecutor Catherine Champrenault. This time the senior prosecutor no longer restricted the matter to disciplinary proceedings. On July 25th 2019 she sent an “urgent” report form to the PNF in order for it to formally refer the matter to the Paris prosecution service, and to ask Paris prosecutors to open an investigation into events “likely to reveal offences of influence peddling, collusion and breach of confidentiality, as the case may be”.
The PNF officially referred the matter to the Paris prosecution service four days later, on July 29th. But the list of potential offences that had been in Catherine Champrenault's request to open an investigation had disappeared from the PNF version. A judicial source at the Paris prosecution service explains that in strict legal terms a prosecution service does not have to detail the facts that it wants to look at in the opening of a preliminary investigation. This is different from an investigation handed to an investigating judge where the terms of reference of the probe are set out. However, it was clear that the potential offences set out in black and white by the Paris prosecutor had somehow vanished in the corridors of the court building.
Indeed, when on September 20th 2019 Le Monde newspaper revealed the existence of this investigation, the Paris prosecution service confirmed to the news agency AFP that it had indeed opened a preliminary probe on September 5th 2019 concerning Éliane Houlette but solely for “breach of confidentiality” during an ongoing investigation. The other two, much more serious, alleged offences of influence peddling and collusion, which had been flagged by both the gendarmes in Marseille and the Paris prosecutor, were no longer mentioned by anyone.
Nineteen days after the Houlette case had been referred to it, the Paris prosecution service asked for the investigation to be switched to another jurisdiction. This was on the basis of the close professional proximity between the prosecutors at the PNF and those of the Paris prosecution service. In the end prosecutors based at Nanterre, west of Paris, took over the criminal investigation. The prosecution service at Nanterre told Mediapart it did not want to comment on the case at this stage.
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- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter