German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s mobile phone features on a list of interception targets on a database of the US National Security Agency (NSA), Mediapart can reveal. In an investigation mounted with whistleblower website WikiLeaks, Mediapart details here how more than 50 phone numbers within the German chancellery, including voice and fax landlines into Merkel’s office and those of her senior staff, were for years the target of interceptions by the NSA. The revelations come just one month after German prosecutors dropped an investigation into earlier claims that the NSA tapped Merkel’s mobile due to what they said was a lack of evidence. Jérôme Hourdeaux and Mathieu Magnaudeix, in collaboration with Julian Assange of WikiLeaks, report.
The United States is conducting widespread economic and industrial espionage against France, including eavesdropping on at least two economy ministers, Mediapart can reveal, as part of its investigation carried out with Libération and WikiLeaks. The ministers concerned were François Baroin, who served under President Nicolas Sarkozy, and his socialist successor Pierre Moscovici, who is now a European Commissioner. But the top secret documents also show that the US National Security Agency has routinely spied not just on politicians and government officials but also French businesses seeking to win contracts abroad. The aim seems to have been to undermine the effectiveness and competitiveness of French companies competing for business on the world market. Fabrice Arfi, Lénaïg Bredoux, Martine Orange, Jérôme Hourdeaux and Wikileaks founder Julian Assange report on the latest disclosures.
It was their secret. Every Christmas from 2003 to 2014, the venerable senators belonging to former French President Nicolas Sarkozy's UMP party, recently renamed Les Républicains, received a hand-out of around 8,000 euros per person on the quiet, on top of their ample salaries and expenses. It was described by the senators themselves as their annual tip or 'Christmas box'. Now the new chairman of their Senate group has decided to put an end to the practice. Mathilde Mathieu reports on yet another example of the Senate gravy-train, which emerges amid a continuing judicial investigation into suspected money laundering and misuse of public funds by the UMP Senate group.
The leaked transcripts and reports on the phone taps carried out by the National Security Agency on three French presidents concern the current head of state, socialist François Hollande, and his right-wing predecessors Nicolas Sarkozy and Jacques Chirac. The documents obtained by WikiLeaks and revealed here by Mediapart reveal the different priorities at the time of the three French heads of state, as well as their different styles. Hollande and his then-prime minister, Jean-Marc Ayrault, were discussing the Greek crisis, Sarkozy hoped to save the world from the financial crisis and Jacques Chirac was handing out detailed orders to his foreign minister. Lénaïg Bredoux and Ellen Salvi from Mediapart and Julian Assange of WikiLeaks report on what the presidents said.
The United States has eavesdropped on at least three French presidents and a whole raft of senior officials and politicians in France for at least six years, according to secret documents obtained by WikiLeaks and revealed here by Mediapart. The top secret reports from America's National Security Agency (NSA) show that the phones of presidents François Hollande, Nicolas Sarkozy and Jacques Chirac were all tapped. But they also show that the espionage carried out on a supposedly key ally of Washington's went even further and deeper, and that senior diplomats, top civil servants and politicians also routinely had their phones tapped. The documents seen by Mediapart reveal proof of the spying on the French state that took place from 2006 to 2012 but there is no reason to suggest that this espionage did not start before 2006 and has not continued since. The revelations are certain to spark a major diplomatic row and highlight once again the uncontrolled and aggressive nature of American spying on friends and foes alike, as first revealed by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013. Mediapart's Fabrice Arfi and Jérôme Hourdeaux and Julian Assange of WikiLeaks report.
On Tuesday a joint committee of French MPs and senators reached agreement on the final content of the controversial surveillance law, the 'loi renseignement', effectively guaranteeing that it will come into force this summer. The measure is one of the most intrusive laws of its kind anywhere in Europe, giving the French security forces wide-ranging powers to snoop on the population. Yet though the legislation has been bitterly opposed by civil liberties groups, judges, administrative bodies and sections of the digital community, it has been voted through by members of the French Parliament amid general public indifference. Mathieu Magnaudeix reports.
French nuclear safety inspectors have discovered numerous faults with crucial safety valves in the cooling system of what will be one of the world’s biggest nuclear power plants under construction at Flamanville, on the Channel coast, Mediapart can reveal. The malfunctioning valves for the Areva-designed, third-generation European Pressurized Reactor could cause its meltdown, in a similar scenario to the 1979 Three Mile Island nuclear accident in the US. The inspectors’ damning confidential report, obtained by Mediapart, follows the revelation last month that the Flamanville EPR reactor’s vessel contained excessive amounts of carbon that could cause it to crack. Pascale Pascariello reports.
French foreign minister Laurent Fabius is the country’s longest-serving socialist politician in government, having previously headed four ministries and becoming, in 1984, France’s youngest ever prime minister at the age of 37. Elected president of the National Assembly, the lower house, on two occasions, he has served as head of the Socialist Party and remains one of its leading officials in a career that spans 40 years. During that period, he has built up a powerful political base in the Seine-Maritime département (county) in northern France, where he has also held numerous local posts, as a Member of Parliament, mayor and councillor. In the run-up to this weekend’s Socialist Party congress in Poitiers, Stéphane Alliès and Mathilde Mathieu have investigated the workings of Fabius’s fiefdom, interviewing local party officials past and present, and uncovered disturbing evidence of a lucrative ‘jobs for the boys’ system of rewards for loyalty. Here they report on how Didier Marie, one of the foreign minister’s faithful local circle of allies, was able to earn 12,000 euros per month over several years from a catalogue of jobs that would, to all appearances, test even the most ardent workaholic.
A system of hidden commissions on investment funds operated by Natixis Asset Management and sold to small investors in France via the company’s parent bank BPCE is estimated to have creamed off about 100 million euros from unwitting customers. Amid an investigation into the affair by the French financial markets regulator, Mediapart publishes here a hitherto confidential list of the 75 funds involved. Laurent Mauduit reports.
The conversations of two African heads of state have been eavesdropped by French police during a major investigation into alleged corruption by a French businessman. The transcripts of the phone-tapped conversations involving Mali's president Ibrahim Boubacar Keita, known as IBK, and Gabon's Ali Bongo reveal a vast system of gifts and favours apparently provided by controversial Corsican businessman Michel Tomi, who has been dubbed the “godfather to the godfathers”. As far as the judges investigating the case are concerned, the phone taps reveal corruption. And for French president François Hollande the content of the transcripts involving IBK will come as a devastating and embarrassing diplomatic blow. For much of Hollande's African policy has been based on the symbolic success of his old socialist friend IBK, who was voted in as president of Mali just months after Paris sent in troops to end an Islamic insurgency there. IBK's election was supposed to usher in a fresh start for Mali and a new era of French diplomacy in Africa. That narrative now looks to be in ruins. Fabrice Arfi, Ellen Salvi, Lénaïg Bredoux and Thomas Cantaloube report.
