Two years after being dismissed from her post, the former director of the classical music festival “La Folle Journée” in Nantes was tried for embezzlement of public funds. On Thursday, the Nantes prosecutor’s office requested a four-year suspended prison sentence for Joëlle Kerivin, for acts committed between 2014 and 2021, while she was working in the mixed economy company. The sums are substantial: 232,000 euros for “La Folle Journée” and 61,000 euros for the Espace Simone de Beauvoir, a space for the defense of women’s rights that Joëlle Kerivin chaired.
Aged 50, the former director is also being prosecuted for breach of trust. “I did anything”, assumed Joëlle Kerivin, who confused herself in apologies explaining having “committed the irreparable”. “I lost my footing everywhere, at all levels” and “I damaged people who are very dear to me”, she explained at the helm. The requisitions are “severe” and “underline well, both the seriousness in terms of amount, but also the seriousness which takes into account the fact that Mrs. Kerivin has visibly organized a system to escape all controls and betray the trust of all its partners”, estimated Emmanuel Cheneval, lawyer for René Martin, the founder of “La Folle Journée”.
A “cavalry” system
According to the lawyer, the respondent had set up “a cavalry system”, which consists of taking money, which she reimbursed with money that she re-punctured. “Accounting, it can pass,” added the lawyer. Main funder of the structure, the city of Nantes had filed a complaint for accounting irregularities. According to the city lawyer, the money would have been spent “on clothes, on brushings”. The prosecution also requested a one-year suspended prison sentence and a fine of 12,000 euros for the auditor, also prosecuted in this case. Judgment was reserved for May 4.
