Wads of tickets, trips to the end of the world, invitations to restaurants, free work in exchange for public contracts: this caricatural corruption applies to Renaud Chervet, who was one of the main directors of the Bouches-du-Rhône departmental council between 2008 and 2016, to be sentenced to five years in prison and a fine of 350,000 euros. The criminal court of Marseilles, Friday, December 2, issued against this former senior official a warrant of deferred deposit, which postpones his incarceration to a few weeks.
Faced with this 50-year-old man standing at the bar, the president of the court, Céline Ballerini, multiplied the reasons for this severity: “very serious facts”, “he allowed himself to be corrupted in a massive way”, “he put in place – some say he would have continued – a clientelist policy that completely distorted the democratic game”, “unbearable acts in a society in which exercising a public function must imperatively refer to a form of exemplarity”.
At the end of October, during the debates, Renaud Chervet, former director of administration, management and accounting within the departmental council, could only admit that he was selling privileged information and confidential documents to a few companies. . A little boss who wanted to enter his “little circle” had filmed, with a hidden camera, meetings with the official. On January 19, 2016, overnight in a car, the two men concluded a pact of corruption: a deposit of 10,000 euros passing from one hand to the other against the promise of a sealing contract.
Codes and nicknames
“I felt a huge sense of shame”, had recognized, sheepishly, Renaud Chervet, after the broadcast of the images on the screens of the courtroom. This video had prompted the prosecutor to denounce “Mafiosi, not civil servants and business leaders”and to claim seven years in prison and a fine of 200,000 euros against this “high territorial official who spreads the rot of corruption within the community”.
In this system of corruption that the prosecution said “well oiled”, Jérôme Disdier, recruited by the county council as an assistant to the contracting authority, responsible in particular for rewriting the public contracts, had been a zealous accomplice. He presented himself as a “intermediary fuse”. The court appoints him as the “hub of the system” and sentenced him to three years in prison with a warrant of deferred committal, a fine of 75,000 euros.
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