An investigation was opened in June 2022 following several reports of breaches of probity.
Searches have been underway since Tuesday morning at the Yvelines departmental council, as part of an investigation aimed in particular at its president, Pierre Bédier (LR), and opened for breaches of probity, a source close to the ministry told AFP. file, confirmed by the parquet floor of Nanterre (Hauts-de-Seine). This preliminary investigation was opened in June 2022 following reports targeting former deputy Pierre Bédier, issued by the French Anticorruption Agency and the anti-corruption association Anticor.
Several people involved
“Searches began (Tuesday) morning at the homes of several people implicated in this investigation, as well as in the services of the local authorities concerned”, said the prosecution, requested by AFP. The investigation is entrusted to the Central Office for the Fight against Corruption and Financial and Tax Offenses (OCLCIFF) as well as to the judicial police of Versailles. At 65, the former deputy and mayor of Mantes-La-Jolie, Pierre Bédier, has chaired the Yvelines department since 2014. He also held this position between 2005 and 2009.
Anticor’s report concerns a subsidy of more than one million euros paid in 2018 by the county council to a project to build a medical center in Mantes-La-Jolie, a project led by a real estate company owned by Pierre Bédier’s brother-in-law and a real estate developer. This report, issued last April, questions the conditions for granting this subsidy, highlighting the three hats of Pierre Bédier in 2018: president of the departmental council, municipal councilor of Mantes-la-Jolie, and president of the council of supervision of Residences Yvelines Essonne.
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To what extent Pierre Bedier “could have influenced and facilitated (…) the granting of a subsidy and then the purchase by a social enterprise of the habitat of 22 housing units from the SCI of his brother-in-law and a partner with whom he personally set up another business?, asks Anticor in its report consulted by AFP. Contacted, the Yvelines departmental council did not react. Pierre Bédier has already had to deal with justice. He was definitively sentenced in 2009 to an 18-month suspended prison sentence and six years of ineligibility for “passive corruption” and “concealment of misuse of corporate assets” when he was mayor of Mantes-La-Jolie.
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