The French financial prosecutor’s office has requested a trial against businessman Vincent Bolloré for corruption, in the investigation into the fraudulent attribution of the management of the ports of Lomé in Togo and Conakry in Guinea between 2009 and 2011, we have learned AFP from a Source close to the matter on Friday.
Seized since 2013, Parisian financial judges suspect the Bolloré group of having used the political consulting activities of its subsidiary Euro RSCG (now Havas) to fraudulently obtain management of the ports of Lomé and Conakry for the benefit of another of its subsidiaries , Bolloré Africa Logistics, formerly called SDV, at the time of the presidential elections in 2010 in these countries.
To avoid a long criminal trial, Mr. Bolloré – 11th fortune in France – as well as Gilles Alix, general director of the Bolloré group at the time, and Jean-Philippe Dorent, international director at Havas, requested in 2021 an appearance on recognition preliminary conviction (CRPC).
During the public hearing, they admitted the facts and accepted a fine of 375,000 euros, but the court refused to approve it, sending the case back for investigation.
The 72-year-old billionaire and media mogul had contested this procedural setback until the Supreme Court, which he claimed had caused an attack on his presumption of innocence, but the highest judicial court validated the procedure at the end of November, paving the way for a new criminal trial.
Monday, according to the Source close to the case, the National Financial Prosecutor’s Office requested a trial for active corruption of a foreign public official against MM. Bolloré and Alix, for breach of trust for the latter and for complicity thereof for MM. Bolloré and Dorent.
“I welcome the referral request” in this “heavy case which has been going on since 2013 (…) in which the President of Togo is particularly involved” Faure Gnassingbé, indicated Me Alexis Ihou, lawyer for the deceased Agbéyomé Kodjo and Brigitte Kafui Adjamagbo-Johnson, unsuccessful candidates for the 2010 presidential election in Togo.
The Bolloré group had benefited from a public interest judicial agreement (Cjip), through which it had paid a fine of 12 million euros against the abandonment of the proceedings.
“A request for dismissal will be presented to the investigating judge”, indicated Messrs Céline Astolfe and Olivier Baratelli, who defend Vincent Bolloré and his group, “the facts having been contested since the first day in a legally empty file.”
The “misstep” of the non-validation of the CRPC in 2021 “definitively deprives the parties of the right to be judged in an impartial and objective manner”, according to these councils.
The final decision on whether to hold a trial rests with financial investigating judge Serge Tournaire.
