The French Minister of Labor Olivier Dussopt is implicated by justice in a case of favoritism while he is in the front line on a very disputed pension reform, but the Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne renewed all her confidence in him on Saturday.
The former socialist must defend from Monday before the deputies the flagship reform of the second five-year term of President Emmanuel Macron in an already tense context. Two new days of demonstrations are scheduled, next Tuesday and Saturday, against the decline in the starting age from 62 to 64, after a record mobilization in the street on January 19 and 31.
And according to an Elabe poll published on Wednesday, 71% of the French remain opposed to the reform.
Mr. Dussopt is suspected of favoritism in a public contract concluded at the end of the 2000s with the water treatment group Saur when he was mayor of Annonay, a small town located in the south of France. The Minister vigorously contested this grievance on Saturday. But the National Financial Prosecutor’s Office (PNF) retained the offense of favoritism for a future trial against him, admitted Mr. Dussopt.
An arrangement around a public market
According to the French news site Mediapart, which revealed the affair, a search carried out at the minister’s premises by financial investigators brought to light exchanges between Olivier Dussopt and (La Saur) which seemed to leave little doubt about the existence of an arrangement around a public market dated 2009-2010, when he was deputy and socialist mayor of this commune of Ardche. Mr. Dussopt has the full confidence of the Prime Minister, however indicated Matignon on Saturday.
Asked, the Elyse did not comment, believing that everything had been said in the reaction of Elisabeth Borne. At the heart of the government system, the 44-year-old minister, who joined Emmanuel Macron at the end of 2017, is also at the helm, with the Minister of the Interior, on the immigration bill. And in the coming months he will be at the forefront of a bill devoted to full employment.
Olivier Dussopt is not the only minister to find himself in turmoil in the midst of pension reform. Before him, Eric Woerth had been splashed by the Bettencourt affair in 2010. The ex-LR who had become a macronist had then obtained a release.
And at the time of the reform project for Macron’s first five-year term, the High Commissioner for Pensions, Jean-Paul Delevoye, resigned in December 2019 for not having declared several mandates to the High Authority for the Transparency of Public Life (HATVP). He was sentenced in December 2021 to four months suspended prison sentence and a fine of 15,000 euros.
Reproduction forbidden.