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Justice investigates whether the Macron government favored private consultants in the last two presidential campaigns in France

2022-11-25T22:26:03.511Z


The president says "he fears nothing" from the investigations by the Prosecutor's Office on the McKinsey company, suspected of aggravated money laundering


McKinsey is once again in the eye of the hurricane in France and threatens to splash President Emmanuel Macron.

The National Financial Prosecutor's Office announced on Thursday that it had expanded the investigation opened around this American consultancy and is now also examining the role that this type of company played in the last two electoral campaigns.

The French justice wants to determine if there was a possible favoritism of the government towards that advisory cabinet.

"I fear nothing," the head of state defended himself this Friday during a visit to Dijon.

"I think the center of the investigation is not yours truly," he added.

Macron was re-elected for a second five-year term at the end of April, but the Macronist caucus was weakened after losing an absolute majority in the June legislative elections.

In the final stretch of the 2022 presidential campaign, the so-called McKinsey case caused an untimely controversy for Macron after a Senate report had blamed him on the growing use of the State to private consultants.

In the statement released on Thursday, the National Financial Prosecutor's Office indicated that it "wants to clarify the situation of the different criminal proceedings that it has opened" after the local press published new information in this regard.

On October 20, the court opened an investigation into the "conditions for the intervention of consulting companies in the 2017 and 2022 electoral campaigns," especially with regard to accounting.

A day later he opened another one, this time to determine if there were situations of "favouritism".

The Prosecutor's text recalls that the investigation was opened on March 31, in the middle of the electoral campaign, for aggravated money laundering and tax fraud, and that it led to a judicial search of the French headquarters of McKinsey on May 24.

The statement from the prosecution does not expressly cite Macron, unlike the newspaper

Le Parisien

, which was the first to report the opening of these proceedings on charges of "favouritism" and "illegal financing of an electoral campaign."

The newspaper specifies that three investigating judges were appointed to lead the investigation and that it is "without a doubt" the "most delicate of the moment."

The McKinsey case had been activated at the end of March, when the Senate, dominated by the conservative opposition, published the final report of a commission of inquiry.

The document pointed to the huge amounts given to private consultants and the "opacity" about their role in government management.

Between 2018, when Macron had just arrived at the Elysée, and 2021, the French government went from spending 380 million euros on consultancies to disbursing 894 million, he highlighted.

He also emphasized that one of the main beneficiaries, McKinsey, had not paid corporate tax between 2011 and 2020.

Although the consultant represented a minimal part of the contracts of these years, it played a prominent role during the pandemic and the vaccination plan.

And employees and managers of McKinsey in France had participated in Macron's campaign in 2017. What they want to establish now is whether that help favored lucrative subsequent contracts for the company.

The state's increasing recourse to external and private consultants is neither illegal nor unique to France.

Nor did they begin with the current president, but rather began to shoot during the term of former president Nicolas Sarkozy between 2007 and 2012, as revealed by journalists Matthieu Aron and Caroline Michel-Aguirre in the book

Les infiltrés

(The Infiltrators), published in French in 2022. .

“It is normal for justice to do its job,” the French leader, who enjoys presidential immunity until 2027, defended himself on Friday. “In a presidential campaign, there are women and men, some who are journalists, magistrates, who are in consultancies, that they are civil servants and that they embark [on the campaign] during their free time.

It has always been like this, ”he insisted.

"My 2017 campaign accounts have already been submitted (...) and validated by the procedures provided by our laws [and] those of 2022 are on their way, like all the candidates," he added.

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Source: elparis

All news articles on 2022-11-25

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