The question has been stirring up debate in the corridors of ministerial offices over the summer. Can advisers from the private sector, recruited as contract workers, be convicted of revolving doors if they then join companies that they have controlled or on which they have given opinions as part of their duties, in the same way as their civil servant colleagues?
This unprecedented debate, which was held in mid-June at the Paris Criminal Court, around the case of Pierre-Yves Burlot – former member of the cabinet of the Secretary of State for the Ecological and Inclusive Transition Brune Poirson (2017-2020), accused of having joined an industrial group with which he had had close relations when he was an advisor –, found its epilogue on Wednesday September 4, while a new ministerial waltz is looming.
The court chose the middle path, acquitting the advisor, who was prosecuted for revolving doors, while specifying in its judgment that the rules applied in the same terms to contract workers and civil servants. “It is clear from Mr Burlot’s employment contract that he was (…) a state contract agent, therefore a public agent, the president of the 32 considered in her judgmente room, Benedicte de Perthuis. [Il était] in this framework subject to the rules relating to ethical control in the public service – which he was not unaware of since he submitted to these rules” by declaring to his superiors his desire to join the Séché Environnement group, a company specializing in the storage, treatment and recycling of waste, a few months after having worked as a technical advisor in green finance and the circular economy.
Ethical risks
The argument of his lawyer, Me Rémi Lorrain, concerning the absence of explicit mention of contract workers in article 432-13 of the penal code which defines the “illegal taking of interests”, also called the “offense of revolving doors”, will not have convinced the judges to exclude contract workers from the scope of this offense. “The court (…) considered that the concept of public contract agent is included in that of public administration agent”the president said.
Following Mr. Burlot’s arrival at the Séché group in early 2021, the National Financial Prosecutor’s Office opened a preliminary investigation, questioning what the thirty-year-old had declared to the High Authority for Transparency in Public Life (HATVP) so that it would accept his hiring at Séché. Since August 2019, the law provides that this authority be notified of any plan to convert ministerial employees into the private sector during the three years following their departure, so that it can rule on the ethical and criminal risks.
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