Faouzi Lamdaoui, one of François Hollande's advisors at the Elysée and a close ally of the president for many years, has been questioned by detectives investigating allegations of “misuse of company assets” and “tax fraud”. Lamdaoui, who advises the French head of state on diversity and equality issues, has denied any wrongdoing. Nonetheless, an investigation by Mediapart has shown that the advisor has been the shareholder, manager or director in a range of similar companies, two of which have been the target of legal proceedings. Lénaïg Bredoux and Emmanuel Morisse report.
The head of the parliamentary group of France’s main opposition party, the conservative UMP, faces a stormy meeting with his MP colleagues on Tuesday after Mediapart’s revelations that, without informing them, he secretly lent their cash-strapped party 3 million euros from what are largely public funds destined for financing the group’s parliamentary activities. The scandal has outraged many within the UMP, and follows Mediapart’s earlier revelations that the party used faked invoices to hide 17 million euros of illegal overspending on the 2012 presidential election campaign of its candidate, Nicolas Sarkozy. Fabrice Arfi, Mathilde Mathieu and Ellen Salvi report.
Mediapart has obtained documents and witness accounts that provide evidence of money laundering by the Banque Pasche de Monaco while it was a subsidiary of French banking giant Crédit Mutuel-CIC. Among the affluent clients of the small bank, based in the Principality of Monaco, is Ricardo Teixeira, a former member of the executive committee of the international football governing body FIFA and who headed Brazil’s World Cup organization committee, implicated in a series of fraud and corruption cases and who deposited more than 30 million euros on his account. A judicial investigation is now underway into the bank’s dubious practices, which were revealed to the Crédit Mutuel-CIC group’s senior management by three whistleblowing staff - who were subsequently sacked, just months before the Monaco bank was sold off last November. Geoffrey Livolsi, Dan Israel and Fabrice Arfi report.
Mediapart can disclose the content of more phone taps concerning former president Nicolas Sarkozy that show how he and his entourage have sought to glean information on the state of judicial probes from senior state officials. One conversation reveals that the ex-head of state was worried about the “loyalty” of the new head of France's domestic intelligence service, from whom he was trying to extract key details. Judges investigating the Libyan funding of Sarkozy's 2007 presidential campaign also believe they may have uncovered the identity of one of the former president's “moles” in the intelligence services. As Fabrice Arfi reports, the revelations provide further evidence about how far Nicolas Sarkozy and his aides seem willing to go in order to find out how judicial investigations are progressing.
French IT firm Qosmos, specialised in mass-surveillance technology and which works on projects for France's intelligence services, is the subject of a judicial investigation launched in April into ‘complicity in acts of torture’. The probe centres on the Paris-based company’s involvement in a contract, led by an Italian company, to supply the Bashar al-Assad regime in war-torn Syria with a system to intercept, open and archive almost all email and other internet traffic flowing through the country. Qosmos says it eventually withdrew from the project for ethical reasons, when the key technology it provided for the project was not yet operational. But, as detailed in this joint report by Mediapart and Reflets.info, the history of the case raises more questions than it provides answers.
President François Hollande's special advisor Aquilino Morelle dramatically quit his job on Friday after Mediapart published revelations about his conflict of interest while working as a government inspector. Morelle, a friend of current French Prime Minister Manuel Valls, carried out private consultancy work for a pharmaceutical company while working for France's public service inspectorate, the Inspection générale des affaires sociales (IGAS). Though Morelle insisted the work had been correctly declared at the time, both his former boss and IGAS itself say he was never given authorisation. The departure of a key figure from the presidential Elysée Palace over claims of an undeclared conflict of interest will be a major embarrassment for President Hollande who, during his 2012 election campaign, promised an “exemplary Republic” under his leadership. Michaël Hajdenberg reports.
Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue, son of the long-serving president of Equatorial Guinea and vice-president in his own right, is under formal investigation by French judges for money laundering. At the heart of the affair are claims that Obiang, who is also defence minister and interior minister, has plundered his country's natural wealth to amass a fabulous collection of late nineteenth art worth 104 million dollars that lined the walls of his luxurious home in Paris. Meanwhile 60% of Equatorial Guinea's population have to survive on less than a dollar a day. Fabrice Arfi investigates.
Since the March 2004 Madrid train bombings, more than 500 people have been arrested in Spain on suspicion of involvement in terrorist actitivity, of which just 50 have been tried and convicted. For in the aftermath of the Madrid attacks, which left 191 people dead and more than 1,800 injured, the Spanish anti-terrorist campaign has adopted a tactic of preventive arrests, many based on little or no evidence, in which the presumption of guilt presides over that of innocence, often prompted by information from foreign intelligence services and interrogations carried out in secret. "On the other hand, we haven’t had any attacks for ten years,” argued one high-ranking Spanish magistrate in this report by Braulio García Jaén, Matías Escudero Arce and Andrés Aguayo.
The A9 motorway linking northern Italy with Switzerland is at the heart of a major gold smuggling racket worth hundreds of millions of euros. Last year, an estimated five tonnes of the precious metal was illegally transported into Switzerland where clandestine cargos are melted down by official refiners and transformed into perfectly legal bars of gold. The business is largely managed by criminal networks surrounding 'cash-for-gold' shops that have mushroomed in Italy since the beginning of the economic crisis in 2008. But while the Italian police have launched a series of investigations into the traffic, the Swiss authorities have displayed a surprising disinterest into what one official dismissed as "a few minor cases of contraband". Federico Franchini reports.
The French citizens’ rights watchdog, the Défenseur des droits, is investigating a complaint that a bus driver with the Paris public transport system, the RATP, refused to let three young Roma men with valid travel passes climb aboard his vehicle, allegedly saying ‘dirty Romanians, you’re like dogs’. Witnesses have come forward to confirm the incident which, as Carine Fouteau reports, is just one of a series involving allegedly discriminatory behaviour against Roma by RATP staff, and which drivers' union officials say they “cannot deny” happen.
