The mayor of Saint-Étienne, Gaël Perdriau (ex-LR) announced on Monday that he did not intend to resign if he was indicted as part of the judicial investigation into the open intimate video blackmail case. since late August.
“An indicted person is always presumed innocent and therefore if this status were to arrive, it would absolutely not change the way I have today to carry out the work that the Stéphanois entrusted to me.“, he declared in the municipal council, in response to a question from the opposition.
“If tomorrow or in a few months, you are indicted, what will you do?“, asked him the leader of the municipal opposition on the left, Pierrick Courbon, accusing him of”continue to run the city as if nothing had happened” and of “play the decay card“.
SEE ALSO – Case of the sextape in Saint-Etienne: the mayor “gave his version of the facts” to the other elected officials
Read alsoExcluded from the Republicans, Gaël Perdriau files a complaint against the party and Éric Ciotti
“Do not trust what you see or what you hear (….). Wait until you know the whole story before passing judgment.“, retorted the mayor who was excluded from the Republicans after a series of revelations from Mediapart on a sextape blackmail aimed at his former centrist first deputy Gilles Artigues.
Namely accused by Mr. Artigues, placed in police custody in mid-September, quoted in damning audio recordings published by Mediapart, Mr. Perdriau has always protested his innocence. The scandal, however, prompted him to dismiss his chief of staff and then to renounce his representative functions for the city and the Metropolis of Saint-Étienne, while the municipal deputy named by name accused of having shot the compromising images resigned.
Tensions with Mediapart
On Monday, Mr. Perdriau also had to justify his legal action to block the publication of new revelations by Mediapart, which the news site considers a “prior censorship» which he contests in court.
“How can you agree to associate Saint-Étienne with such infamy?asked Olivier Longeon, president of the environmental group. The mayor said it was “new accusations based on private conversations, excessive language, anger“, on the basis of “illegal recordingsmade by his former first deputy.
Read alsoSextape blackmail: the mayor of Saint-Étienne, Gaël Perdriau, excluded from the Republicans
He acknowledged remarksrude and baseless but held in the private and restricted setting of my office, in a moment of extreme tension with my first deputyin this recording from November 2017.
“Don’t associate with the scavengers who want to bring me down“, he launched, referring to a case “odious and unhealthylinked according to him by his positions within his party. “I think that until these people have my skin, they will continue to slander me“, insisted Mr. Perdriau while a hundred demonstrators gathered in front of the town hall at the call of a collective of the left demanded his resignation.