2023-11-07 20:54:50
At the start of the day, he stands straight and demure in front of his desk, at the end he growls behind the backs of the witnesses on the stand and shouts at the prosecution. At his trial, Eric Dupond-Moretti defended himself fiercely on Tuesday against the suspicions in his “lunar” eyes of conflicts of interest.
At the start of his interrogation, the Minister of Justice begins by asking the Court of Justice of the Republic (CJR), which is judging him, to imagine for a moment what “falls upon him” when he is “chosen” to be a minister.
This “great upheaval” in July 2020 requires the man who was undoubtedly the best-known lawyer in France – notably for his notorious outbursts – to “buy ties”, tame “a totally foreign world”, put together a firm, understand a “complex” administration, police its usually “flowery” language, he lists.
“I have one goal, which is to succeed in my ministry. The rest I don’t care”, summarizes the minister, “sorry for saying it like that”.
“This thing, this thing, it fell on me, not because I wanted it. I inherited it because it had been initiated by my predecessor,” Nicole Belloubet, he said.
This “thing” are administrative investigations that he launched as Minister of Justice against four magistrates, including the former head of the National Financial Prosecutor’s Office (PNF) Eliane Houlette.
These investigations targeting judges with whom he had disagreements when he was a lawyer have now earned him this unprecedented trial for “illegal taking of interests” – a first for a serving Minister of Justice.
“Let me explain”
“It’s my old life”, “the least of my worries, I have a thousand things to do”, assures the ex-star lawyer with thirty-six members of the bar.
And then, “what would have been my interest, someone will still have to explain it to me?” », Protests the minister, while President Dominique Pauthe asks him several times if he did not see the potential conflict of interest coming.
“I have never asked my administration to speed up or push through a procedure, ever,” he swears. And “no one told me ‘conflict of interest’. Person “.
The floor is given to the Attorney General at the Court of Cassation, Rémy Heitz. He and the minister are more used to meeting during institutional meetings but here, it is the senior magistrate who makes the accusation.
Mr. Heitz is surprised by the choice to open administrative investigations against the magistrates of the PNF when the inspection report commissioned by his predecessor gave “19 recommendations” to improve this “young prosecution” but “none” in the disciplinary area .
Also read Eric Dupond-Moretti: “For me and for my loved ones, this trial is an infamy”
The minister evades, gets exasperated, slams the microphones while walking away a few steps at the end of his punchlines: “everyone is right except me in that!” “, “quite extraordinary! “.
To the second advocate general Philippe Lagauche, he says “would it tear your mouth to call me Mr. Minister? “.
Mr. Dupond-Moretti recalls that he faces five years of imprisonment. And comments in the third person singular on his own affair: “it’s not nothing what the Minister of Justice did… very serious.”
Before blurting out, as if disappointed: “he did what he could, the Keeper of the Seals, at a time when he was not in control of things. It’s complicated for me to say that but it’s the reality, and the only reality.”
“Instrumentalization”
Unmoved, the Attorney General asks if, since he was just starting out in the profession, he should not have favored “caution” over “action”. Especially when the magistrates’ unions had “from the outset” pointed out a risk of an “obvious situation of conflict of interest”, he notes.
The minister retaliates. “And you, you bring the accusation against me when (the former head of the PNF) Eliane Houlette is one of your close friends, you don’t think that you are in a conflict of interest? »
“Colleague, not close friend,” corrects Rémy Heitz, but Eric Dupond-Moretti no longer listens, grumbling against the “biased” questions and the “instrumentalization” of the procedure.
The hearings with union officials – at the origin of the complaint against him – did not calm him down, on the contrary.
Also read Eric Dupond-Moretti, the Minister of Justice caught by the courts
“It’s very unpleasant,” finally blurted out the former president of the Magistrates’ Union (SM) Katia Dubreuil, who came to describe the minister’s “denial” in the face of the “alerts,” and tired of the grumbling behind his back.
Céline Parisot frankly shakes the defendant off his hinges. His organization, the Union Syndicale des Magistrates (USM), had described the appointment at Place Vendôme of the lawyer with notoriously poor relations with the judiciary as a “declaration of war”.
“Nothing I could do found favor in their eyes”, “I absolutely had to resign”, the minister rages, his finger pointed at her.
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