Computer equipment and files have already been taken away. Various stakeholders are also heard, among other things as witnesses, they add.
The investigating judge and the members of the Federal Judicial Police of Namur, assisted by colleagues from Brussels and Liège, as well as representatives of other entities of the General Directorate of the Judicial Police, including the Central Office of Repression of Corruption and the Federal Computer Unit in charge of the fight against computer crime are in charge of these searches which were still in progress at 5:00 p.m. More than 120 police officers were engaged in this operation.
The registry of the Walloon parliament, located in Square Arthur Masson in Namur, was visited by around fifty investigators.
The examination of the documents seized in order to establish possible irregularities, will take several days or even several weeks, according to justice.
Ongoing searches in the Walloon Parliament
“The only thing I can tell you at this stage is that there are no surprises. A judicial investigation has been opened and this search is a step in it”, had indicated earlier in the day the president of the regional parliament André Frédéric.
“All I ask is that everything be clarified in the greatest transparency,” he added.
According to Le Soir, justice is particularly interested in the conditions under which the Brussels company Synapsis was selected by the clerk Frédéric Janssens to modernize the parliament’s management software. According to the daily, one of the directors of this company had previously intervened in parliament as a consultant and had in this context obtained a copy of the software to be updated before submitting its offer, which constitutes an obvious advantage over its competitors. .
At the end of November, the former Bureau, then chaired by Jean-Claude Marcourt (PS), denounced these facts to the Namur public prosecutor’s office, which then transmitted the file to an examining magistrate.
At the same time, the pedestrian tunnel between the car park and the parliament buildings as well as the house of parliamentarians are also in the sights of justice while the two sites have recorded an explosion in their costs under the supervision of Frédéric Janssens.
At the beginning of the week, the latter saw his suspension, in progress since mid-September, extended by 6 months by the Bureau of Parliament. This decision is now accompanied by a deduction of 20% of his salary and the obligation to return his benefits in kind, including his company cars.