A complaint for corruption and embezzlement of public funds was filed in Paris on the Alstom case, after the sale of the group's energy pole to the American General Electric and the failed merger with the German Siemens, we learned on Monday. with the Anticor association.
In this complaint filed in the financial center of the Paris court, the association asks that individuals, including the former CEO of the group Patrick Kron, be prosecuted in France for corruption in this case.
"If the legal person Alstom has, by a plea-guilty, recognized facts of corruption which have been perpetuated for long years and if a lamp maker has had a long stay in an American prison, the natural persons guilty of the corruption have not been prosecuted, either in France or elsewhere, "says Anticor in a statement.
A new complaint, after that of January 2018
In December 2014, the French group had paid a record $ 772 million fine in the United States for corruption in several countries. A senior company executive, Frédéric Pierucci, was arrested on April 14, 2013 when he arrived at the New York airport for a corruption case in Indonesia, and was sentenced to 30 months in prison. In addition, Anticor calls for an investigation into the decision of the State to waive its right to buy 20% of Alstom shares, held by the Bouygues construction group, when the Alstom rail the German conglomerate, "renouncing a gain of around 350 million euros".
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Anticor had already lodged a complaint in January 2018 of the charge of "negligence by a person in charge of the public authority" concerning these facts. But she had been quickly dismissed by the Paris public prosecutor's office. In its new complaint, the anti-corruption association estimates, based in particular on the parliamentary report of 2018 of the former chairman of the committee of inquiry to the Assembly on the industrial policy of France, Olivier Marleix, that the State has lost "consciously" 500 million euros, "if we take into account the dividends and surplus value lost", "in favor of the company Bouygues".