Did they know who they were reporting to?
This Saturday, March 16 in the morning, two men rang at a private home, in Versailles (Yvelines), along an avenue located near the Notre-Dame district.
They are police officers, they say, and need to “verify access to the safe.”
The man who opens the door to them is 91 years old.
Face to face with these two strangers, he becomes suspicious.
As he tries to call his children, the two individuals snatch the phone from his hands and flee.
The fake police officers have just robbed… a former Secretary of State, Philippe Essig.
The information was confirmed to Le Parisien this Monday by the Versailles public prosecutor's office.
He managed the RATP, the SNCF and the Channel Tunnel
Trained at Polytechnique, bridge and road engineer in the 1950s, Philippe Essig was general director of RATP between 1982 and 1985, then president of SNCF from 1985 and 1988. He then took over as president of the company TML (Trans Manche link), the Channel Tunnel.
In 1988, Philippe Essig was briefly Secretary of State for Housing in the government of Michel Rocard.
The old man filed a complaint at the police station this Saturday morning, specifying that his stolen phone contained “sensitive data”.
The investigation was entrusted to the Versailles judicial police.
“We have no leads at the moment.
The victim's cell phone contains telephone numbers of political figures,” specifies Maryvonne Caillibotte, public prosecutor in Versailles.