Total canceled an advertising campaign it had planned to broadcast in
Le Monde
, after the newspaper published an investigation accusing the oil group of having shared its gas revenues with the Burmese military, we learned. Thursday with the daily.
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Questioned by AFP, the management of
Le Monde
confirmed that a Total advertising campaign which was to appear in the newspaper in the coming weeks had been canceled by the group.
For its part, requested by AFP, Total made no comment.
An especially symbolic sanction for the newspaper, Total not being a big advertiser.
In addition, the daily, thanks to the success of its digital subscriptions, is doing well financially and has reduced its dependence on advertising in the last years, which represents about 22% of its revenues.
Precedents
And this is not the first time that the daily has been deprived of advertising by a company implicated in one of its articles. In 2015, the banking giant HSBC withdrew its ads from the media, including
Le Monde
and the British daily
The Guardian
, which had published the "Swissleaks", revelations about a case of large-scale tax evasion. Other French newspapers have been confronted with similar situations. LVMH had withdrawn in 2012 its
Liberation
advertisements
after its front page which implicated its boss Bernard Arnault, with the provocative title "Casse toi riche con".
Le Monde
published an investigation on Tuesday which revealed that a financial package around a gas pipeline operated by Total in Burma would have made it possible, for years, to direct hundreds of millions of dollars from gas sales directly to the military of this country, to the detriment of the Burmese state.
