Mr. Le Maire had recognized on Sunday "abuses" and a "drift" in the past in the significant recourse of ministries to consulting firms to carry out public policies.
Two judicial inquiries have been opened by the courts on the intervention of consulting firms in Emmanuel Macron's electoral campaigns in 2017 and 2022, to try to find out whether they were not then unduly favored in the attribution public contracts.
"I don't know what a drift or abuse is, I know that when I needed to catch up with Germany in the vaccine campaign (against Covid-19, editor's note), I did appeal to a company which had just advised Germany in the development of vaccination centers", declared Mr. Véran, who was Minister of Health between February 2020 and May 2022.
He spoke of processes "which are super clear and transparent" in the attributions.
"It's not that I'm saying that I don't agree or not" with Bruno Le Maire, it's that in the Covid crisis, "we really really had no choice", he said. he continued.
Recalling President Emmanuel Macron's watchword to "reduce the sail on contracts with private firms", he regretted that the State no longer has "sufficient skills to manage everything on its own".
“There have been programs to reduce civil servants, of which certain presidents have made themselves the heralds,” he recalled.
At the time, "the State considered that it was no longer up to it to keep civil servants (...) and that it would go through the private sector when it needed it", he lamented.
© 2022 AFP