He is not on the same line as his colleague.
Olivier Véran, the government spokesperson, takes the opposite view of the Minister of the Economy, Bruno Le Maire, on Monday, about the judicial information opened on the possible favoritism which the private firm McKinsey would have benefited from on public contracts. .
The former Minister of Health thus refutes any "drift" or "abuse".
Remarks which go against those of Bruno Le Maire, who, on Sunday, recognized "abuses" and a "drift" in the past in the significant recourse of ministries to consulting firms to carry out public policies.
Two judicial inquiries have been opened by the courts on the intervention of consulting firms in Emmanuel Macron's electoral campaigns in 2017 and 2022. The aim is to try to find out whether they were not then unduly favored in the award of public contracts.
The State no longer has "sufficient skills to manage everything on its own"
"I don't know what a drift or an abuse is, I know that when I needed to catch up with Germany in the vaccine campaign
(against Covid-19)
, I called on a company which had just advised Germany in the development of vaccination centers ”, declared, on France inter, Olivier Véran, who was Minister of Health between February 2020 and May 2022.
He spoke of processes “which are super clear and transparent” in the attributions.
"It's not that I'm saying that I don't agree or not" with Bruno Le Maire, it's that in the Covid-19 crisis, "we really, really had no choice", said he continued.
.@olivierveran on the McKinsey affair: "A judicial information means that justice has been seized by associations, which for some do it quite often concerning us" #le7930inter pic.twitter.com/fE8kiaXCPu
– France Inter (@franceinter) November 28, 2022
Recalling President Emmanuel Macron's watchword to "reduce the sail on contracts made with private firms", he regretted that the State no longer has "sufficient skills to manage everything on its own".
“There have been programs to reduce civil servants, of which certain presidents have made themselves the heralds,” he recalled.
At the time, “the State considered that it was no longer up to it to keep civil servants (…) and that it would go through the private sector when it needed it”, he lamented.