A man reported to be aged 34 and carrying a handgun who on Thursday took six people hostage in a bank in the northern French port town of Le Havre, where former prime minister Édouard Philippe is mayor, surrendered hours later to police and released his captives apparently unharmed.
In a ruling by the Versailles court of appeal on Friday, French bank Société Générale was found to have been in large part responsible for the 4.9 billion euros in losses attributed to the reckless trades of its so-called “rogue trader” Jérôme Kerviel in 2008. The court ruling concerned Kerviel’s appeal against the damages he was required to pay the bank, which until now was fixed as the entire sum of the losses, and which it reduced to 1 million euros. Mediapart economics and finance correspondent Martine Orange analyses here the many consequences of the ruling, not least of which is the demand that the bank now pay back a 2.2-billion-euro tax break it was granted as a result of the sums lost.
The Financial Times cites April letter by Philippe Hébert who underlines 'particularly poor' control services that leave 'serious risks of money laundering'.
The newly-appointed minister of the economy, Emmanuel Macron, is the latest in a series of French politicians going back to the days of President Georges Pompidou who have come to government from the influential Paris-based investment bank Rothschild et Cie. In September 2012, a few months after Macron had become President François Hollande's deputy chief of staff, Mediapart's Martine Orange published a book investigating the power and influence that the Rothschild bank wields because of its position at the junction of French politics and business. Mediapart publishes selected extracts from the book below to shed light both on the new minister and the bank itself, with an introduction by Mediapart's editor François Bonnet.
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