After nearly 23 years in office, Jean-Noël Guérini could lose his title of senator.
The Minister of Justice, Éric Dupond-Moretti, on Friday seized the Constitutional Council with a request for forfeiture of his mandate, after his conviction for illegal taking of interests, confirmed the chancellery to AFP after Provence gave information.
The senator from Bouches-du-Rhône was sentenced on May 28 by the Marseille Criminal Court to three years in prison including 18 months suspended, 30,000 euros fine and five years of ineligibility in a vast case of alleged rigging public procurement. The former strongman of the PS, president of the general council of Bouches-du-Rhône from 1998 to 2015, was accused of having preempted a piece of land under the pretext of saving a rare plant, then of having resold it. to an urban community, in order to favor his brother Alexandre, entrepreneur, who needed it for the extension of a landfill.
Jean-Noël Guérini appealed against the judgment and must be retried in the fall by the Aix-en-Provence Court of Appeal at the same time as his brother, sentenced at first instance to six years in prison, and five other people, also sentenced in the spring.
Jean-Noël Guérini should have given up his post of senator
The court having pronounced the provisional execution for this additional sentence of deprivation of civil rights, Jean-Noël Guérini should have given up his post of senator, his last electoral mandate.
To suspend it legally, he should have obtained from the first president of the court of appeal that he suspend this part of the sanction.
The referral to the Constitutional Council by the Minister of Justice is only formal, the Senate office could have formulated it.
But questioned by AFP at the beginning of June, the Senate had estimated that "if the person concerned appeals, he retains his mandate until the court decision has become final", referring in particular to a decision rendered in 2009 by the Council constitutional in a case concerning the former senator and president of French Polynesia Gaston Flosse.
The Wise Men of the rue Montpensier could follow their own case law and stay the ruling until a final decision is rendered, which also covers the possible delay of an examination in cassation.
