The CEO of TotalEnergies was accused by three associations of having maintained confusion between his mandate as administrator of the school and that of CEO of TotalEnergies during the debates on the establishment of a research center.
The National Financial Prosecutor’s Office (PNF) on Monday closed the investigation targeting TotalEnergies CEO Patrick Pouyanné and Polytechnique regarding the project to build a building for the oil group on the school’s Essonne campus, which was subsequently abandoned. Asked by AFP, the PNF confirmed that it had “proceeded on Monday to close without further action the preliminary investigation opened on the counts of illegal taking of interests and favouritism, complicity and concealment of these offences following a report from the associations Anticor, Greenpeace and Sphinx on the grounds that at the end of the investigation, the offences were not sufficiently characterised”.
In April 2021, the NGOs Greenpeace and Anticor, as well as the association of former students of the École Polytechnique, the Sphinx, filed a complaint with the Paris judicial court for “illegal taking of interests”. All of them criticized Patrick Pouyanné, appointed to the board of directors of Polytechnique in September 2018, for having maintained the confusion between his mandate as administrator of the school and that of CEO of TotalEnergies during the debates on the establishment of this research center at the heart of the university campus. The establishment of this building, with a surface area of 10,000 m², to accommodate 400 people to work on the “decarbonization of energy”, had been contested by some of the students and professors of Polytechnique. A demonstration had taken place in March 2020, and the project had finally been abandoned at the beginning of 2022.
“A step backwards in the fight against breaches of integrity”
This ranking of the survey “constitutes a step backwards in the fight against breaches of integrity which worries the complainants”, deplored the three associations in a press release on Tuesday. They “regret that a case targeting a particularly influential personality, a French multinational and a leading public institution, did not lead to the appointment of an investigating judge independent of the executive branch.” That’s why “Anticor, Sphinx and Greenpeace France are considering filing a complaint with civil action so that an investigating judge can be appointed,” warns the press release.
The PNF specifies that “The question raised by the case was whether Patrick Pouyanné had exercised supervision and administration of the operation of establishing the research centre in his capacity as administrator of the École Polytechnique, and in particular whether the terms of his intervention during a board of directors meeting could constitute an illegal taking of interests.” However, the PNF considered that its intervention during a board meeting in April 2020 had been “very limited” et “transparent”.
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