Senator Reconquest! of Bouches-du-Rhône Stéphane Ravier was sentenced to six months in prison and one year of ineligibility, without provisional execution, on Wednesday by the Marseille criminal court, for illegal taking of interests. His son, Thomas Ravier, whom he had hired by the city of Marseille when he was sector mayor in 2015, was sentenced to a fine of 10,000 euros, including 5,000 euros suspended, and to one year of ineligibility. , again without provisional execution.
Absent at the deliberations on Wednesday morning, the elected official announced via his lawyer that “as it stands” he was appealing this decision. “This decision is not based on a strictly legal level and the offenses alleged against my client are not characterized,” said the elected official’s lawyer, Me Julien Pinelli.
His son also condemned
This ineligibility, even if it were confirmed on appeal, would not prevent the elected official from Eric Zemmour’s party from running in the municipal elections in Marseille in 2026, as he did during the 2014 and 2020 municipal elections. Stéphane Ravier was prosecuted for having hired his son Thomas in the green spaces department of the 7th sector of Marseille, where he was elected mayor during the 2014 municipal elections, under the National Front label, which later became National Rally. He gave up his chair in 2017 to his niece, due to multiple mandates, after his election to the Luxembourg Palace.
Thomas Ravier was finally appointed to his post in January 2020, six months before the municipal elections which shifted the Marseille town hall to the left, after four terms of office of Jean-Claude Gaudin (Les Républicains), who recently died. At the hearing in mid-April, Stéphane Ravier refuted all the accusations, ensuring that “sector town halls do not have the power to hire anyone”. According to him, he only “let his son know” that there was “regular recruitment at Marseille town hall, and it stops there”.
After which, “there will be no more intervention on my part,” he said. “There is absolutely nothing normal about obtaining a public job through private intervention,” replied prosecutor Mathieu Vernaudon. “Stéphane Ravier put his political weight into play with the office of the mayor of Marseille” and “the file establishes that he used his elective mandate to mobilize his teams (at the sector town hall) with the aim of recruiting his son and renew his contract until permanent employment”, a “lifetime employment in the territorial civil service”, insisted the magistrate.