Paris (AFP)
Parisian dinners as luxurious as they are clandestine, despite the pandemic?
Paris prosecutor Rémy Heitz opened a criminal investigation on Sunday after a report by M6 on such banned feasts, in which ministers could have participated, according to the claims of an anonymous source on the channel.
The private channel broadcast Friday evening a report on a hidden camera in a place presented as "an underground restaurant located in the beautiful districts", where the participants and the waiters do not wear masks and do not respect barrier gestures.
The channel also broadcast other images of a paid evening, where dozens of guests appear without masks, some kissing each other.
All in defiance of the prohibitions enacted to curb the spread of Covid-19.
One of the organizers interviewed, presented as a "collector", affirms in disguised voice-over: "I had dinner this week in two or three restaurants which are supposedly underground restaurants, with a certain number of ministers. gently laugh. We are in a democracy. We do what we want ".
In view of the images of M6 and their previous publications on the networks, the restaurateur has been identified by several media and Internet users as being Christophe Leroy and the host as being Pierre-Jean Chalençon, owner of the "Palais Vivienne", located in the central Paris.
"Completely false," denied the latter on Twitter.
The public prosecutor, Rémy Heitz, announced Sunday at the end of the day to have seized "the Brigade for the repression of delinquency in the person (BRDP) of the Parisian judicial police of an investigation of the heads of endangerment of others and hidden work ", in order to" check whether parties were organized in disregard of sanitary rules and to determine who were the possible organizers and participants ".
Sunday, the controversy on this subject was for a moment the most trendy on Twitter, under the hashtag #OnVeutLesNoms, fueled by the words of several ministers, questioned in the Sunday broadcasts.
At the Grand rendez-vous Europe1 / Les Echos / Cnews, the Minister for Citizenship Marlène Schiappa thus estimated that "if ministers or deputies" have had their meals during such clandestine dinners, "they must have fines and that they be penalized like any other citizen ".
Later, on Twitter, she endorsed a user who believed that if it was true, the ministers had to "release fissa" from the government: "It goes without saying. With a fine," tweeted the minister.
- "Same rule for everyone" -
Several of his colleagues in the executive, however, ruled out that a member of the government could participate in these dinners.
"I do not believe for a single second," said Gabriel Attal, government spokesman, on LCI.
"We have a duty to be totally irreproachable and exemplary," he insisted.
During the RTL-LCI-Le Figaro Grand Jury, the Minister of the Economy, Bruno Le Maire, also seemed skeptical: "All the ministers, without exception, respect the rule".
"I would be curious that this restaurateur gives the names of the ministers if he is so well informed as that", he added.
The case took an administrative and judicial turn on Sunday afternoon.
Seized by the Minister of the Interior Gérald Darmanin, the Paris police headquarters opened an administrative investigation.
During a visit to a vaccination center in Marcq-en-Baroeul (North), the tenant of Beauvau specified that "either (these facts) are false and one should not cast the reproach obviously, or they are true and obviously (...) people must be able to be prosecuted and, I imagine, condemned for having organized such parties. "
"This is completely unacceptable," Darmanin continued.
"Every day, the police and gendarmerie services intervene (...) in the working-class neighborhoods because there are giant barbecues, because people do not respect confinement. It is obvious that in the most beautiful neighborhoods of the capital, the rule is the same for everyone. There are not two types of citizens with those who have the right to party and those who would not have the right ", he insisted .
© 2021 AFP