In what is the first legal move of its kind in France, oil and gas and giant TotalEnergies, the former Total, is the subject of an investigation by French public prosecutors which was opened after three NGOs filed a complaint accusing the group of “misleading commercial practices”. The complaint centres on the multinational’s claims over its credentials in policies for environmental protection and the limiting of global warming, including being a “major player” in energy transition, which the NGOs say amounts to deliberately deceptive “greenwashing”. Mickaël Correia reports.
Alexis Kohler, chief of staff of the French presidential office, the Élysée Palace, and a long-serving aide to President Emmanuel Macron, has been placed under investigation for 'unlawful taking of interest' over his undisclosed family and professional ties to an Italian-Swiss shipping company when working for the French state holdings agency and as a senior official on Macron's team at the finance ministry.
A report by the European Union’s anti-fraud agency OLAF, now passed on to the French public prosecution services, accuses Marine Le Pen, the far-right candidate who will face Emmanuel Macron in this month’s presidential election final round, of the fraudulent misuse of 137,000 euros of public funds she received from the European Parliament when she was an MEP, Mediapart can reveal. Other individuals close to her are also accused by OLAF of defrauding the parliament. Marine Turchi and Fabrice Arfi report.
An independent commission investigating child sexual abuse in the French Catholic Church has made a 'minimum estimate' that up to 3,200 paedophile priests and other church members have been active since 1950, the commission's chairman has revealed ahead of the presentation on Tuesday of a 2,500-page report, based on church, court and police archives as well as witness interviews.
Several French police officers, including a commissioner, two commanders and a brigadier, face being disciplined over a “series of failures” in the case of a woman who had filed a complaint for violence against her husband who is accused of later shooting her in the street and then setting her on fire with petrol.
Agnès Buzyn faces investigation over claims of "endangering the lives of others" said prosecutors, but not for a second possible offence of "failure to stop a disaster".
Francois Fillon, 67, who served as French prime minister throughout the 2007-2012 presidency of Nicolas Sarkozy, and who has appealed his conviction last year for fraudulently employing his wife, paid out of public funds, as a parliamentary assistant, is again being investigated for the suspected use of a parliamentary assistant to write a book he published in 2015.
The Paris prosecution services have advised that a judicial investigation into the alleged complicity of French troops in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda of Tutsis by Hutu extremists be dropped for lack of evidence.
Former French prime minister Édouard Philippe, who stepped down on Friday to become mayor of the town of Le Havre, former health minister Agnès Buzyn and her successor Olivier Véran, are to be investigated over their handling of the Covid-19 virus epidemic after a special court for judging members of government over wrongdoing while in office accepted nine complaints lodged against them.
The flight recorders from the Pakistan International Airlines' Airbus which crashed short of the runway at Karachi airport on May 22nd, killing 97 people on board, have been sent to France for examinsation by the country's air accident investigation agency, the BEA.
In an interview with The New York Times while in temporary exile in Italy, author Gabriel Matzneff, once celebrated by Parisian literary circles for his accounts of sex with underage girls and boys in France and abroad, and who is now under investigation in France for the sexual abuse and grooming of a minor, said he felt 'like the living dead, a dead man walking', turning on his former admirers for 'showing their cowardice', and accusing those who now denounce him of hypocracy.
The chief Paris prosecutor on Tuesday appealed for past victims of sexual abuse by author Gabriel Matzneff, 83, once revered by French lierati for his books about his sexual adventures with young minors, to come forward in the framework of an investigation into accustaions of sexual abuse and grooming of a minor made against him in a book published in January.
French filmmaker Christophe Ruggia was on Thursday placed under formal investigation for “sexual assault of a minor” following an investigation opened by the Paris public prosecution services into actress Adèle Haenel's allegations, revealed by Mediapart, that she was sexually harassed by Ruggia over a period when she was aged between 12 and 15.
A French public prosecutor on Friday said Joel Le Scouarnec, 68, a former surgeon due to stand trial in March for rape and assault of four children, is now suspected of sexually assaulting up to 349 children according to evidence found in his computer files and a diary, adding that 229 alleged victims have been questioned, of who 197 have filed complaints against Le Scouarnec.
The trial of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, 68, leader of the leftist La France Insoumise (France Unbowed) party, began on Thursday in which he and five other party members are accused of intimidating police and public prosecution officials during a 2018 search of his home and party offices conducted as part of an investrigation into alleged election funding irregularities.
