The alleged damage could reach three million euros, spread over twenty years. An investigation was opened because of a suspicion of fictitious employment with the “Canard enchaîné”, a satirical and investigative weekly, report France Inter and Le Monde. The information was confirmed to Parisian.
Christophe Nobili, journalist for this media, brought to light the potential affair. While the Duck’s workforce is quite modest with about twenty employees, he found that a person who is unknown to him had also been part of it for about twenty years. It is the companion of a historical designer of the newspaper, André Escaro, employed since 1959 and now 94 years old. The latter was still present in the pages of the palmipede in the spring and left the board of directors at the beginning of the summer.
A “terrible dilemma”
At the beginning of May, Christophe Nobili filed a complaint with the status of whistleblower. An investigation was opened for “abuse of corporate assets” and “concealment of abuse of corporate assets”. It is entrusted to the financial brigade of the Paris prosecutor’s office.
A business specialist, Nobili notably worked on the François Fillon case, the Republican presidential candidate of 2017, caught up in a fictitious job file in which he has since been convicted. The journalist also investigated the interests of the Bolloré group in Africa or those of the Bouygues group.
His lawyer explains to Le Monde that risking harm to his business by revealing the facts constituted a “terrible dilemma”. But he claims to have felt that keeping quiet would have been more difficult. “The complaint is not against the newspaper, but against a system that was set up by two or three people, and to which others may have turned a blind eye.”