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.
Mediapart can reveal the content of the controversial phone bugging carried out on former president Nicolas Sarkozy. Details of seven phone taps show that the ex-head of state set up what amounts to a dirty tricks operation to neutralise the judges who are investigating him. The extraordinary content of the calls confirm that Sarkozy's team used senior judge Gilbert Azibert to find out information about the Bettencourt affair. And that Sarkozy's lawyer Thierry Herzog was kept informed by a mole in the upper echelons of the state about the progress of the investigation over the Libyan funding of the former president's 2007 election campaign. As Fabrice Arfi and Karl Laske report, it is the start of a new state scandal involving Nicolas Sarkozy.
François Gouyette, who is now ambassador to Tunisia but was France's man in Libya from 2008 to 2011, has revealed to judges that two different well-placed Libyans told him that there had “indeed” been funding by Muammar Gaddafi's regime of Nicolas Sarkozy's successful bid to become French president in 2007. The fluent Arabic speaker also told the investigating magistrates that the Libyan document published by Mediapart in April 2012 revealing the illicit funding looks genuine. His intervention follows a whole string of senior figures from Libya, both friends and foes of the late Gaddafi, who have confirmed that the financing of the Sarkozy election campaign took place. Fabrice Arfi and Karl Laske report.
The breast implant scandal in which faulty implants with sub-standard silicone gel were supplied to women all around the world revealed how the French company PIP that made them fiddled safety inspections to avoid being found out. Mediapart has since exposed the extent to which the French medical watchdog was slow to react to this growing scandal. Now, based on previously unpublished documents, this website can disclose that years before the PIP affair came to light many of the surgeons who bought and used the implants for patients were concerned at the substandard nature of the product – and that some unsuccessfully tried to raise the alarm. Michel de Pracontal reports.
Revelations about phone taps on Nicolas Sarkozy and his lawyer Thierry Herzog have caused a major legal and political row. Lawyers say the eavesdropping is a breach of lawyer-client privilege, right-wing politicians have claimed there is a plot to discredit the former French president, while the phone taps themselves suggest evidence of 'influence peddling'. But the judicially-approved eavesdropping also targeted former interior minister and close Sarkozy ally Brice Hortefeux as part of the investigation into illegal funding of the Sarkozy 2007 presidential campaign by the Libyan regime. Here Mediapart publishes extracts from some of those phone taps which show how a senior policeman phoned Hortefeux to warn him about details of the investigation and to coach him about how to prepare for questioning – in flagrant breach of procedural regulations. Fabrice Arfi and Karl Laske report.
Frédérique Dumas, head of Orange Studio, the film production arm of French telecoms giant Orange and which has co-produced several major box office hits including The Artist, was called upon to abandon the funding of a biopic about the late fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent in order to protect the private interests of Orange CEO Stéphane Richard, according to documents obtained by Mediapart. The move was aimed as a favour for Pierre Bergé, a major shareholder of French daily Le Monde and president of its supervisory board, whose paper was at the time publishing an unflattering series of articles about Richard’s implication in a high-profile judicial investigation into suspected fraud. Dumas, who refused to abandon the coproduction project, has since lost her job. Michaël Hajdenberg reports.
La dernière enquête PISA révèle une plus faible performance des élèves issus de l'immigration, à milieu social équivalent. Des chiffres qui vont à l'encontre de toutes les statistiques officielles publiées jusque-là.
