The decision was expected since, on January 8, the Attorney General at the Court of Cassation, François Molins, announced that he would soon open a judicial investigation for “illegal taking of interest” targeting the Minister of Justice Eric Dupond-Moretti .
It is therefore done, and the investigation has been entrusted to the investigating commission of the Court of Justice of the Republic (CJR), which acts as investigating judge in this case which involves a minister.
Eric Dupond-Moretti is the target of complaints from the Anticor association and three magistrates' unions who accuse him of conflicts of interest linked to his former activities as a lawyer.
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Since his appointment to the government in July, received by the unions as a "declaration of war on the judiciary", the Minister of Justice has been faced with accusations of conflicts of interest which he rejects.
Two complaints and three reports in particular have been sent since the end of September to the CJR.
Peeled telephone billings
At the heart of the accusations, the administrative proceedings ordered by Eric Dupond-Moretti against three magistrates of the National Financial Prosecutor's Office (PNF), who had participated in a preliminary investigation aimed at identifying the mole who allegedly informed Nicolas Sarkozy and his lawyer Thierry Herzog that they were bugged.
During these investigations, detailed telephone bills of several lawyers, including that of the future minister, had been examined.
One of these complaints also accuses the Minister of having opened another administrative investigation against Judge Edouard Levrault who had denounced, after the end of his functions as an investigating judge in Monaco, having been pressured.
Before becoming minister, Eric Dupond-Moretti had been the lawyer for one of the police officers indicted by this magistrate and had criticized the judge's methods.
After examination, the CJR's complaints commission, made up of senior magistrates and which acts as a filter, found admissible the complaints of Anticor and the Union Syndicale des Magistrates, the Syndicat de la magistrature and the SNM Magistrates Unit. FO, according to the press release from François Molins last Friday.