A few months of suspended prison sentence and a few thousand euros in fines put an end to a vast investigation by the National Financial Prosecutor’s Office (PNF) into years of excesses linked to working time at the town hall of Marseille. During an appearance hearing on prior admission of guilt before the Paris court, Jean-Claude Gaudin, 82, mayor (Les Républicains) of Marseille from 1995 to 2020, was sentenced, Tuesday, March 22, to six months suspended prison sentence and a fine of 10,000 euros for “negligence having allowed the embezzlement of public funds”, between December 2013 and April 2018. This offence, punishable by a maximum of one year in prison and 15,000 euros in fine, aim “a breach of the duty of supervision but not a breach of probity”recalled the financial prosecutor.
Former chief of staff, director general of services and human resources… five former collaborators very close to Jean-Claude Gaudin were sentenced for this same offense of negligence to penalties ranging from a simple fine of 5,000 euros to six months in suspended prison sentence and a fine of 5,000 euros.
A seventh defendant, René Giancarli, former CRS who became head of Samusocial, is the only one to be sentenced for “embezzlement of public funds” to ten months in prison suspended. It was from Samusocial that the investigation started in December 2016, which would reveal large-scale rogue practices concerning the working hours of 12,000 Marseille municipal officials and the payment of overtime not worked.
The National Financial Prosecutor’s Office identified no less than nine departments in which the legal annual working time set at 1,567.5 hours by a deliberation of December 2004 – already below the 1,607 hours applicable at national level – was far from being respected. Between 800 and 900 hours of work at Samusocial, almost half-time paid like full-time, 1,364 hours until 2017 in the service of museums, twelve more at the municipal conservatory…
No measure has been taken to enforce the duration of working time, noted the PNF in its summary of the investigation. In a report from August 2019, the regional chamber of accounts of Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur estimated that “The lost and unrealized hours of work represent nearly 300 people who would work full time”.
“I was not aware of this”
The gendarmes also brought to light an illegal practice of granting overtime without real compensation, even in duplication with compensatory rest, including in services that did not even respect the legal annual working time. The same volume of overtime paid eleven months out of twelve was carried over from one year to the next.
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