2024-01-13 13:18:57
The president of the Guadeloupe Regional Council, Ary Chalus, attends a signing ceremony for convergence and transformation contracts, at the Ministry of Overseas Territories, in Paris, July 8, 2019. LUDOVIC MARIN / AFP
The court will therefore have inflicted a snub on Ary Chalus, the president of the Guadeloupe Region, while the latter remained confident at the end of the trial which was held in mid-October 2023 for “breach of trust” and “exceeding campaign account ceilings” during the 2015 regional elections.
The regional president, found guilty of all charges, received a fifteen-month suspended prison sentence on Friday, January 12, a fine of 25,000 euros and a ban on running an association for three years. The investigations demonstrated an infraction of the electoral law and a “break of equality” between the candidate lists during the ballot. Facts relating to a “extreme severity”according to the president of the court, leading to a “break social pact”.
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The investigation was initially opened against, in particular, Lucette Michaux-Chevry who died in September 2021 and former president of the South Basse-Terre agglomeration. She was suspected of having had numerous people hired by the community to carry out on this area of the archipelago the campaign of Mr. Chalus. The investigations were traced, one thing leading to another, to several dozen invoices linked to the regional election campaign, for a total amount of more than 160,000 euros, and paid by an association with a cultural, social and sporting purpose. , of which Mr. Chalus himself was president. Stating that there was no evidence, the president of the court only retained approximately 58,000 euros as being part of the offense.
The PS “victim of a system”
Inflexible and stubborn in these interrogations, the president of the court finally opted for a judgment which went against the initial requisitions of the prosecution, which had not ruled on the penalty of ineligibility, in particular. President Ary Chalus appeared tested by the decision, while he was playing for acquittal at best, and a weak conviction at most.
But it was the application of the law of September 2017 on the probity of elected officials which got the better of the defense’s argument, based on a weakness in the investigation as to the traceability of invoices and related services, a point on which the defense had focused a lot.
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In the ranks of the Socialist Federation of Guadeloupe and its head of list Victorin Lurel, who had filed a civil suit, we welcome the full recognition “as victims of a system and maneuvers” having “obviously distorted the result of the 2015 election” and in particular the “first round, with a difference of 3,456 votes in conditions which will remain, for history, fraudulent”.
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