Asked by Sonia Mabrouk about the management of the Marianne fund, Marlène Schiappa, Secretary of State for the Social and Solidarity Economy and Associative Life, said: “Defamation takes the elevator and the truth takes the ‘stairs”.
The management of this “Marianne Fund for the Republic”, launched by Minister Marlène Schiappa a few months after the assassination of Professor Samuel Paty, had been the subject of several reports to the courts after press articles. When it was created, in April 2021, this fund displayed the ambition to “finance people and associations who will make speeches to promote the values of the Republic and to fight against separatist speeches, in particular on social networks and online platforms” , Marlène Schiappa told AFP.
However, at the end of last March, the weekly Marianne And France 2 released a joint investigation exposing his opaque management. According to their investigations, the main beneficiary of the fund, the USEPPM association, with its 355,000 euros endowment, only fed a website and publications with little follow on social networks.
Some 120,000 euros were also used to pay two of its former leaders. The website Mediapart then revealed that several left-wing personalities had been denigrated in content posted online by another structure benefiting from the fund, “Rebuild the common”, which obtained 330,000 euros. Since then, the National Financial Prosecutor’s Office (PNF) opened a judicial investigation on Thursday on suspicion of “embezzlement of public funds” in the management of the Marianne fund.
“I was defamed in this case”
The Secretary of State disputed all the accusations of misappropriation at the microphone of Europe 1: “A few weeks ago, some tweeted or even headlined articles on information based on unverified information, with badly written and quickly copied dispatches in which I was accused of embezzlement. It has now been shown that I have no friend among any winner of the Marianne fund. It’s been swept away. I haven’t taken the slightest penny. I was defamed in this case”.
She also praised the work of the Senate inquiry committee on the Marianne fund affair. It also disputes the accusations denouncing an opacity around the structures chosen by the fund, the amounts allocated, content unfavorable to opponents.
“Not at all. I want to answer that. Moreover, it has been shown on unfavorable content. An association is accused of having made videos against Mrs. Hidalgo. It is shown that this association has also made videos against Mr. Véran, against Mr. Darmanin, against the President of the Republic and even against myself. So there is no political order to criticize Anne Hidalgo”, she declares.
“These are videos on the critical spirit of young people who criticize the entire political class, including myself. So we can see how grotesque this accusation is. I am not paying associations to let them criticize me!”, continues Marlène Schiappa.
She is also on the accusations of opacity: “There is a decision by the CIPDR not to make the winning associations public in order to protect them because when we speak out on issues of the fight against radicalization, on issues of secularism, we are very often threatened, even threatened with death. And so the CIPDR had decided not to make the list of these associations public”, she concludes.