Almost a hundred years old, he is tried 20 years after the events in Nanterre

It is a very particular trial which opens this Monday at the criminal court of Nanterre. Jean Bonnefont, 99 years old, appears in the corruption case of “the boiler room of Defense”. “Judging a 99-year-old man is mind-boggling!”, Indignant Olivier Baratelli, the defendant’s lawyer. “Are you able to remember what you did twenty years ago with sufficient precision for it to be the subject of a trial?” Asks the lawyer. “The defense is annihilated by time”. Former leader of the former Charbonnages de France, Jean Bonnefont is being prosecuted along with four other business leaders for having distorted between 1999 and 2003 the award of the lucrative heating and air conditioning market for the first European business district, estimated at several hundreds of millions of euros.

The affair began in 1998, when the Mixed Syndicate of District Heating of La Défense (Sicudef) launched the renewal of the market held for thirty years by Climadef, a subsidiary of Charbonnages de France. Three years later, he attributed it to a group of companies called Enertherm. But fraud law enforcement spotted anomalies in the process. From June 2002, a first judicial investigation was opened for “corruption” and “influence peddling”, then another was opened the following January for “abuse of corporate assets”.

The investigation implicates, in addition to Jean Bonnefont, the former number 3 of the Compagnie Générale des Eaux-Vivendi Bernard Forterre, 82 years old today, and the businessman Antoine Benetti, 68 years old. The trio are accused of having distorted the market to secure their allocation to Enertherm, whose shareholders were in fact the same as those of Climadef, the former concessionaire. The prosecution assures that the call for tenders was presented in such a way as to exclude undesirable candidates and that the files filed by the German company RWE and the former concessionaire were offers “of cover” supposed to simulate competition. At the center of the alleged cartel was Charles Ceccaldi-Raynaud, the “omnipotent” president of Sicudef according to testimony from the time, indicted for having received a commission of 5 million francs (760,000 euros).

>> To read also – Suspicion of a rigged market at the Defense: the prosecution wants a trial after 18 years of investigation

Pots-de-vin

A protagonist of the financial package, Laurent Gimel, said during the investigation to have handed bags of tickets to a relative of Charles Ceccaldi-Raynaud. Bribes intended, according to his words, to water the members of Sicudef. The former senator-mayor of Puteaux will be largely absent from the trial. He died in July 2019 at the age of 94, just days before the prosecution took its requisitions. For the anticorruption association Anticor, civil party, it is the demonstration of a “complicit justice” which would have, according to her, waited for the disappearance of the senator-mayor to pronounce his order of dismissal. This case “is one of those files put in a closet to protect prominent political figures,” lamented Jérôme Karsenti, Anticor lawyer.

He also regrets the conditions of the trial: because of their age, the defendants “could be likely to cause pity, while they have become richly rich”, he said. The prosecution did not respond to requests from Agence France-Presse. Returned in particular for “corruption”, “complicity in corruption” or “abuse of corporate assets”, the main defendants dispute the facts. They risk up to ten years in prison and a million euros fine. Monday, their councils intend to plead in the preamble the non-respect of the right to be tried within a reasonable time.

>> To read also – Case of gold bars: the mayor of Puteaux spent 48 hours in police custody

The trio’s defense also denounces insufficient charges. “If there had been irrefutable evidence, it would have taken a few months to get the case out” instead of twenty years, Baratelli said. The sprawling investigation, which was followed by eight judges in succession, led to the discovery of large sums in accounts opened in Luxembourg by the Ceccaldi-Raynaud family. Charles Ceccaldi-Raynaud had then accused his own daughter Joëlle, who succeeded him at Puteaux town hall, of having received these bribes, defending himself personally against any offense. The elected LR, as well as the optician Alain Afflelou who also appears in the case, were heard as assisted witnesses and finally dismissed. The trial, adjourned in September due to the health crisis, is set to last until Friday.

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