This Wednesday, the Court of cassation, France’s highest court, ruled on requests for annulment of the proceedings against Vincent Bolloré and two other executives of Bolloré company concerning suspicions of corruption in Togo. For the Court of Cassation, the procedure is therefore valid and the investigation can continue.
The limits of negotiated justice
In 2013, a judicial investigation was opened to shed light on the conditions under which the company Bolloré Africa Logistics, a subsidiary of Bolloré SE, was granted an extension of the duration of the concession for the management of the port of Lomé, only deepwater port in the region, between 2009 and 2011. The judicial investigation rely on suspicions of corruption of foreign public officials. The company Bolloré SE is suspected of having offered financial support to the re-election of the president of Togo, Faure Gnassingbé, through the group’s Havas subsidiary, which allegedly underbilled for its political consulting services. In exchange, the African leader would have allowed Vincent Bolloré to obtain this extension of the port management concession.
Vincent Bolloré, and two other executives of the group have been indicted since 2018 as part of this investigation. In 2021, they benefited from an alternative procedure to prosecution (CRPC), during which they pleaded guilty of active corruption of a foreign public official and complicity in breach of trust in Togo, consenting to the payment of a fine of 375,000 euros each. This procedure, negotiated in advance with the French National Financial Prosecutor’s Office to avoid a trial and any public exposure, was later dismissed by the Paris judicial court which considered that the facts were too severe.
For these same facts, the company Bolloré SE was able to benefit from a legal procedure negotiated via a Judicial Convention of Public Interest (French equivalent of deferred prosecution agreement: Convention Judiciaire d’Intérêt Public, CJIP). The company was imposed to pay a fine of 12 million euros while escaping the most important sanction: exclusion from public procurement.
The importance of a public trial
Vincent Bolloré and the two executives indicted requested the annulment of the entire procedure arguing that their fundamental rights would have been violated as they previously consented to a “plea guilty” procedure.
The Supreme Court confirmed this Wednesday the validity of the investigations. This decision of capital importance, confirms the autonomy of negotiated justice applying to companies From proceedings involving individuals. It is essential that these corruption cases, which contribute to the erosion of confidence in democracy, are exposed through public trials.
