2023-06-14 09:01:49
Mohamed Sifaoui had planned an early wake-up call. This Tuesday, June 13, he was to be heard, at 9 a.m., by the Senate commission of inquiry into the “Marianne fund”. Two security officers, who always accompany the journalist as soon as he leaves his home, were to escort him to the Luxembourg Palace. But, at dawn, change of program. Around 6 a.m., other police officers showed up at his Parisian home for a search.
The investigators, within the framework of a judicial investigation opened on May 4 by the National Financial Prosecutor’s Office for “misappropriation of public funds through negligence”, “breach of trust” and “illegal taking of interests”, seek to understand how the Union of Physical Education and Military Preparation Societies (USEPPM), a small unknown association of which Mr. Sifaoui was one of the administrators, was able to benefit from the largest subsidy – 355,000 euros initially planned – from the Marianne fund. This windfall of 2.5 million euros in public money was created by Marlène Schiappa, then Minister Delegate for Citizenship, in the spring of 2021, a few months after the terrorist assassination of a history and geography professor, Samuel Paty, in order to finance the response to separatist speeches.
Among the 17 beneficiary structures of the Marianne Fund, the USEPPM is of particular interest to justice. Not only because this association was, until recently, not really interested in questions of secularism and religious radicalism. But also because, out of the 266,250 euros received by the project of which Mohamed Sifaoui was the “editorial advisor”, three quarters were used to pay the salaries of the essayist and of Cyril Karunagaran, ex-president of the USEPPM. Contacted by The world, Messrs. Sifaoui and Karunagaran had, Wednesday morning, not responded to our requests.
Rather discreet in the media in recent weeks, the essayist contented himself with a four-page press release, published on Twitter on April 12, in which he admits having touched “43,529 euros net taxable”from the beginning of June 2021 to the end of May 2022, for, according to him, “a job well done”. attacking the “mediocre and defamatory journalistic work” published on the Marianne fund affair in recent months, he denounced the“revengeful spirit” from some “former members [de l’USEPPM], discarded in 2018 »which according to him would have “supplied journalists with oriented information that was intended to harm”.
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