Do supermarkets cheat with the support of elected officials? Interview with the founders of the association “In all franchise”

2023-05-09 19:30:00

ESSENTIAL MAINTENANCE – Martine Donnette and Claude Diot are former merchants. In 1994, they founded the association “In all honesty”following the expropriations of their two small businesses, to make way for the extension of a large area. “Carrefour took our new stores (…), for zero francs”, they claim.

Martine describes her case: when she had just invested in a haberdashery business, Carrefour signed a commercial lease for her. However, the sign then knows full well that a building permit has been filed: the store is destroyed. A comparable administrative mishap happens to Claude, who will also lose his business.

These trying experiences give rise to their commitment. They specialize in commercial law. What is allowed? What is it not? They want to know. Martine declares that she then discovered “a world of fraud”.

Which does not only concern Carrefour, moreover, but is perpetuated, according to her, with the complicity of mayors, elected officials, the DGCCRIF (General Directorate for Competition, Consumption and the Repression of Fraud), management equipment, investigating judges and prosecutors.

In short, a system of “laisser-faire”, far too favorable to the construction or expansion of surfaces for mass distribution, against which it is then very difficult to fight with the weapons of the law.

This is for Martin and Claude to shed light on the problem of unfair competition for surfaces, which can be linked to illegal establishments. According to Martine Donnette, “there is a total omerta, there is no longer any press that will say that it is the fault of local elected officials if all these town centers are lost”. Town centers which are suffering from the installation of these supermarkets which are putting a large number of small businesses on the ground.

To tell their story and share their acquired knowledge, Martine Donnette and Claude Diot published in 2021, the book “418 billion, the fraud of large retailers with the complicity of elected officials and the administration”, published by Talma.

This figure is an estimate of what the state loses by not attacking these big companies like Amazon, Leclerc and others and by letting them do it without counter-power.

In this Essential Interview, Martine Donnette and Claude Diot look back on 29 years of struggle to try to alert the population to, not an isolated case, but a whole scandalous system against which the government is doing nothing.