Members of the French Football Federation's National Technical Board, including the France team coach Laurent Blanc (pictured), have secretly elaborated a plan to impose quotas on the number of young black players and those of North African origin among the country's youth training centres which groom potential candidates for the national team, Mediapart can reveal in this exclusive investigation.
French Senate president Gérard Larcher entered office on a high-profile campaign to cut spending and impose budgetary discipline within the French parliament's notoriously lavish upper house. Mediapart this month obtained access to the payroll of the president's private staff, and it reveals anything but austerity. The average monthly salary is 8,500 euros while his principal private secretary earns more than 19,000 euros, just a few hundred euros short of the pay of French Prime Minister François Fillon. Mathilde Mathieu and Michaël Hajdenberg report.
The controversy over the 403 million euros of public funds awarded in 2008 to French businessman Bernard Tapie in his dispute with French bank Crédit Lyonnais returned to the fore this month, lighting a fuse to a series of scandals-within-the-scandal. Laurent Mauduit reports.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy has assumed a high profile in the international military offensive launched to support the rebellion against the regime of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. But US diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks, and published here by Mediapart, shed a revealing light upon previously sweet relations between Sarkozy and Gaddafi (photo), described by one American ambassador as a "honeymoon" period of "high hopes for lucrative contracts".
Mediapart has obtained access to secret notes belonging to a now-retired senior French intelligence officer which establish how for years the French secret services collaborated with suspected war criminals, military officers from the former Yugoslavia, while they were wanted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) based in The Hague. Among them was Croatian General Ante Gotovina (photo), finally captured in the Canary Islands in 2005, as revealed in this investigation by Jean-Arnault Dérens and Laurent Gesli.
The privately-owned, 1960s-built ‘Chêne Pointu' housing estate (photo) in the run-down Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois contains 1,500 apartments. Slumlords rule the roost here, where more than two-thirds of inhabitants live below the poverty line and insalubrious, overcrowded flats are rented, room by room, for as much as 1,800 euros per month. The local authorities complain that they are largely powerless to combat the blatantly illegal practices. Edouard Zambeaux investigates.
The French press industry receives a staggering one billion euros annually in State aid, amounting to a "fiasco" and a "scandal" according to a government-commissioned study. Now newspaper publishers are under pressure to restructure or die before the tap runs dry. But, as David Medioni and Vincent Truffy report here, time is fast running out on a business still unable to define its future.
A Paris court ruling has left French oil giant Total facing a claim for 170 billion dollars (131 billion euros) over a contract negotiated in Russia 20 years ago by a defunct subsidiary. No corporate entity has ever before faced a damages claim for such a huge and potentially devastating amount. Martine Orange reveals a Kafkaesque legal drama with a colourful cast that includes an entrepreneur and former F1 racing driver known as ‘Dédé the Sardine' and the late French novelist Françoise Sagan.
The fall of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak followed directly the overthrow in January of Tunisian President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali. The two strongmen had much in common, beginning with their secret police. Mediapart has obtained official documents seized during the strife in Tunisia which illustrate the extent of the Ben Ali regime's nationwide web of informers, ranging from taxi drivers to undercover agent 'activists'.
A private jet used by French foreign affairs minister Michèle Alliot-Marie while holidaying in strife-torn Tunisia for the New Year belonged to a company run by the reviled brother-in-law of deposed Tunisian President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, Mediapart can reveal (along with the aircraft's intriguing flight log).
