These pieces will remain valid, despite the vagueness that continues to envelop their origin.
This Tuesday, the Court of Cassation refused Tuesday to invalidate the recordings of a meeting between Alexandre Benalla and Vincent Crase in violation of their judicial control, which had briefly taken them to prison in February 2019, according to a judgment consulted by the AFP.
The recordings, broadcast by Mediapart on January 31, 2019, revealed that the former collaborator of President Macron and his friend, a former employee of LREM, met on July 26, 2018, four days after their indictment in the case of the violence of May 1st.
A brief remand in custody
The publication of these recordings, the origin of which remains unknown, led the judges to revoke the judicial control of the two men and to place them in pre-trial detention on February 19, 2019. They had obtained their release on appeal a week later. .
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The defense of the two men contested the validity of the use of these recordings by the courts, suspecting that they were made by intelligence services.
If this hypothesis, not demonstrated, were true, such recordings, not declared by the services, would constitute unfair proof in the legal proceedings.
Alexandre Benalla appealed against a March judgment of the investigating chamber of the Paris Court of Appeal which had already refused to invalidate these recordings.
In its judgment, the Court of Cassation does not “exclude” the possibility that “the public authority has contributed to the making of these recordings”.
A criminal complaint from the two men
However, "the admission to the file of evidence cannot be declared irregular on the sole ground that the conditions for their collection have remained uncertain".
After their broadcast by Mediapart, the two men had filed a criminal complaint for "unlawful possession of technical devices or devices such as to allow interceptions to be made", "invasion of privacy", "violation to the representation of the person ”and for“ false ”.
The Paris prosecutor's office, for its part, instructed the Criminal Brigade to identify the recording conditions and the origin of these mysterious captions.
In these recordings, the two men mentioned in particular the security contract signed between Vincent Crase's company and a Russian oligarch, Iskander Makhmudov, targeted by an investigation by the national financial prosecutor's office.
