The public bank Bpifrance was raided in July as part of a preliminary investigation for illegal taking of interests carried out by the National Financial Prosecutor’s Office (PNF), AFP learned Thursday from a source close to the case, confirming information from Marianne .
As the weekly wrote, Bepifrance was raided on July 26 by investigators from the Anti-Corruption Office (Oclciff), five days after the PNF actually opened the investigation.
The weekly Marianne discovered, in a report from the Court of Auditors on the activity of Bpifrance, that more than 200 employees of the public bank, including the general director Nicolas Dufourcq, had “massively invested” in a fund called “Bpifrance Companies 1”.
In this report, published on June 12, the Court of Auditors noted that the system raised “ontological questions”. Initially, she noted “no offense”, but finally sent a report to the PNF on July 19, two days after Marianne’s article.
This BE1 fund, managed by the public bank, was launched in 2020 to allow “the French to more easily invest their savings in French companies”, within the framework of the Pacte law.
“Investors have doubled their investment in less than two and a half years, a gain of just over 100 million euros,” wrote Marianne, who specified that the entry price of this “risky mutual fund” was set at 5,000 euros.
Nicolas Dufourcq had rejected the accusations in a publication in July on Linkedin, affirming that “there (had) been no illegal taking of interests, no privileged information and even less a sell-off”.
The fund constituted a “risky product” and Bpi employees did not benefit from “preferential conditions”, assured the general director, specifying that the performance of the fund was “rather good, but lower” than Marianne indicated.
At the beginning of October, Mr. Dufourcq indicated that investing in this successful fund was not “a conflict of interests but an alignment of interests.”
Faced with “reservations expressed by shareholders”, Bpifrance specified in July that it had prohibited, by individual letter, members of the boards of directors, members of the general management committee of Bpifrance and members of the project team, from subscribing basically successor BE2″.