A criminal investigation was launched in France in 2021 over the sale of 36 Dassault Aviation Rafale fighter aircraft to India in a deal concluded in 2016 and worth 7.8 billion euros. The judge-led probe is examining the involvement of India's Reliance Group, owned and run by businessman Anil Ambani, who became Dassault's industrial partner in the massive contract signed by the French and Indian governments. Detectives are also looking into the funding by Anil Ambani's company at the same time of a film produced by actor and producer Julie Gayet, the partner of the then French president François Hollande. She has been questioned by detectives as part of the investigation. Will the former president himself now be interviewed? Karl Laske reports.
By the time of his death in January 2025 the founder of the far-right Front National, Jean-Marie Le Pen, had been out of front-line politics for a few years. But right until the end this deeply divisive figure still had the ability to make waves. According to a new will drawn up in August 2023 and whose existence Mediapart can reveal, Jean-Marie Le Pen bequeathed to his wife Jany the right to continue to live at the family's manor in a wealthy suburb of Paris. This has hampered his daughter Marine Le Pen, who only found out about this will after her father’s death, in her efforts to sell the property. As Karl Laske and Marine Turchi report, the veteran far-right figure's final wishes are now the subject of intense family negotiations.
On Wednesday a parliamentary inquiry led by MPs published its reported on the scandal at the prestigious Notre-Dame-de-Bétharram private Catholic school in south-west France and the wider issue of the abuse of pupils in French schools. Prime minister François Bayrou, a former education minister and local politician whose own children attended that school, was criticised by the inquiry for “failing to act” in relation to the scandal. However, in their report, the MPs also refer to the “Pélussin affair”, which broke in 1995 at a Catholic boarding school in the south-east of France. According to documents uncovered by Mediapart, in that case, too, François Bayrou ignored whistleblowers, who have now attacked his “inaction”. Mathilde Mathieu and David Perrotin report.
An international investigation called 'Dirty Payments', conducted by Mediapart and 20 other global media outlets, reveals the billions of euros in dubious transactions processed by the French online payments giant Worldline, a group run by the cream of France's elite. The probe shows how for ten years, and with complete impunity, the group handled these fraudulent or unethical payments on behalf of the worst figures in e-commerce: online swindlers, illegal casinos, shady pornography groups and prostitution websites. Following the initial publication of the revelations by the European Investigative Collaborations (EIC) network, prosecutors in Belgium announced they were launching an investigation into alleged “money laundering” in relation to Worldline's Belgian operation. In a statement, Worldline said it would cooperate with the authorities in Brussels. Yann Philippin and Clément Rabu report.
In June 2024 President Emmanuel Macron caught many by surprise when he dissolved the National Assembly and called snap parliamentary elections. His aim was to strengthen his hand in the Assembly where his party and its allies lacked an absolute majority. However, the ploy backfired and the outcome of the new elections left the Assembly more politically divided than before, with even less chance of being able to produce a stable government with a full legislative programme. So, deprived of influence over major legislation, MPs now paradoxically find themselves swamped with a flood of largely small-scale bills on diverse issues. Though amid the apparent chaos some new parliamentary habits are beginning to take root. Pauline Graulle reports.
Caroline Parmentier is a Member of Parliament for the far-right Rassemblement National and a key strategist for that party's former presidential candidate Marine Le Pen. In particular, she has been one of the architects of Le Pen’s so-called “de-demonisation” strategy to soften the party's image and erase memories of its murky past. Yet an investigation by Mediapart has shown that over a period of 30 years Caroline Parmentier wrote racist, anti-Semitic and homophobic comments for a far-right publication. She also openly expressed her support for Marshal Philippe Pétain – who headed France's wartime Vichy government which collaborated with the Nazis - on Facebook as recently as 2018. Rassemblement National now faces growing embarrassment over these revelations about a woman who is a close friend of Marine Le Pen. Fabrice Arfi and Antton Rouget report.
In a series of confessions before US and German prosecutors, the transcripts of which have been obtained by Mediapart, former Libyan secret services agent Musbah Eter detailed how intelligence chief Abdullah al-Senussi, Muammar Gaddafi’s brother-in-law, and his bomb-maker “Masud”, planned and carried out a series of bombings in the 1980s, including that which downed a Pan Am Boeing 747 over the Scottish town of Lockerbie in 1988. Eter’s statements, given in a series of interrogations between 2013 and 2015, have never before been made public and remained unexploited by prosecution services. That may change ahead of a new trial over the Lockerbie bombing due in the US next April. Karl Laske and Vincent Nouzille report.
The macabre and seemingly weekly occurrence of bodies washed ashore on France’s northern Channel coast bears witness to the recurrent tragedies that befall migrants attempting the dangerous clandestine passage to southern England in overcrowded, unseaworthy dinghies. When the small boats sink, the exact numbers of passengers who originally embarked on them is mostly unknown, as are the numbers who disappear in the incidents. Maïa Courtois, Maël Galisson and Simon Mauvieux report on the difficult and often mismanaged process of identifying the corpses of victims returned by the sea, and the angst of the families who remain uncertain of their fate.
In the spring of 2024 reports that Malian-born French singer Aya Nakamura would perform at the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics later that summer attracted controversy and opposition. More than a year later, thirteen members of the extreme-right group Les Natifs are set to stand trial in a Paris court over a banner they wrote attacking her planned participation in that ceremony. Among those appearing in court on June 4th is a young woman who, at the time of the banner incident, was a parliamentary assistant to MPs from the far-right Rassemblement National party. Matthieu Suc reports.
The French intelligence services are on the alert for saboteurs in the pay of Russia operating across European countries, including France, and who are said to be planning to intervene during forthcoming elections on the continent. The security agencies fear that their methods will not involve simply disinformation but more direct action. The next Kremlin target could be the Polish presidential election later this month. According to intelligence reports, these potential saboteurs have been trained in the Balkans, in particular by a Bulgarian neo-Nazi who is wanted by French prosecutors in connection with the painting of red handprints on the Shoah Memorial in Paris in 2024. Matthieu Suc reports.
