InvestigationIn an investigation for “Le Monde”, the author of the book “Les Fossoyeurs”, the journalist Victor Castanet, reveals opaque financial circuits and embarrassing documents for certain senior leaders of the world’s number one private clinics and nursing homes.
A car is parked near 12, rue Jean-Jaurès, in Puteaux (Hauts-de-Seine). Inside, two men are waiting. One of them has placed on his lap a kind of briefcase containing a keyboard and a touch screen. At 12:30 p.m., it’s time for the lunch break and it’s also the time for the duo to get into action. They get out of the car pulling two wheeled boxes and head for the headquarters of the Orpea group, the world’s number one private clinic and nursing home. Here they are soon at the entrance, against the flow of employees leaving the building. A young woman welcomes them, takes them up to the fifth floor, then leads them to the office of the director of human resources (HRD), Bertrand Desriaux, where she leaves them alone.
Once the door is closed, one of the visitors opens the famous briefcase. It’s an Oscor Green, a spectral analyzer capable of detecting the presence of unwanted microphones. The two men are employees of the company Æneas, a benchmark in private security. This day in 2016, they are there at the request of Mr. Desriaux. Their mission: to ensure that the latter, one of the pillars of Orpea, is not spied on. While one scans the radio frequencies, the other checks the shelves, opens the drawers, unscrews the light bulbs, removes the power strip switch. No doubt: there is no microphone, they can put away their equipment and leave. In a year they will come back for the same work, says “dusting”. This is how it is: Orpea’s HRD is very keen on this annual audit.
Who is he protecting himself from? Not from the competition, as one might imagine, but from his own group. Two men, above all: the director general (CEO), Yves Le Masne, and one of his collaborators, Victor Rodrigues, the head of the IT services department (DSI). Since the mid-2010s, tensions have been growing within Orpea’s management. The climate is so tense that the members of the “top management” begin to investigate each other, through surveillance companies paid by the group’s treasury. Hundreds of thousands of euros are spent, thousands of pages of reports produced. The world had access to some of these documents, in this case more than 1,800 pages. These new elements shed a new light the past excesses of this group in full crisis since the publication, in January, of the book The Gravediggers (Fayard, 400 pages, €22.90).
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