A judicial investigation for corruption of a foreign and concealed public official targeting Alstom was opened on March 23 after the complaint with civil action filed by the anti-corruption association Anticor, we learned on Tuesday from a judicial source.
The association had filed in December 2020 a complaint for corruption against X with civil action with the dean of the investigating judges of the Paris court, a procedure which leads to the almost systematic opening of a judicial investigation.
In 2014, the leaders of Alstom had agreed to sell the important energy branch of their group to the American industrialist General Electric (GE) for an amount of approximately 12 billion euros.
The same year, in December, the French group had paid a record fine of 772 million dollars in the United States for acts of corruption in several countries.
These acts of corruption led to the weakening of Alstom, which facilitated the takeover of the energy branch by GE with negative consequences on employment and very positive for the remuneration of the actors of this merger, had estimated Anticor in a press release. at the time of filing the complaint.
Several complaints filed
These acts, committed by natural persons, are extremely serious since they led to the loss of one of the French flagships to the benefit of the Americans, one of Anticor’s lawyers, Me Etienne Tte, told AFP. .
As long as the leaders of Alstom have pleaded guilty to acts of corruption in the United States and that the legal person has been condemned, this necessarily means that natural persons have carried out these acts of corruption, developed Me Tte.
For the president of the association, Elise Van Beneden, it is important that those responsible, both natural and legal persons, be tried before French law. The sprawling Alstom affair is one of the biggest state scandals involving issues of industrial, energy and diplomatic sovereignty, she considered.
The association filed several complaints after the sale of Alstom’s energy pole.
To substantiate this last complaint, Anticor relied in particular on the 2018 parliamentary report on France’s industrial policy, the plea agreement signed by Alstom in the United States and the book written by a former executive of the group French, Frdric Pierrucci, sentenced in the United States for a case of corruption in Indonesia.
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The controversial takeover of Alstom by GE is also the subject of a preliminary investigation by the national financial prosecutor’s office, after the reporting in 2019 to justice of Olivier Marleix, then president of the parliamentary commission of inquiry.
He wondered in particular about the circumstances of this sale and the role played by Emmanuel Macron, then Minister of the Economy.
In this report, the current president of the LR group at the assembly was also surprised that the French judicial authorities had never opened an investigation into Alstom after the payment of its fine for corruption.
In addition, the social and economic committee and the GE Belfort inter-union filed a complaint with the PNF last May, in particular for laundering tax evasion, against the American group.