Mayor Alain Ferrand was indicted on Tuesday for, among other things, “corruption by a publicly elected official”, “favoritism” and “illegal taking of interests”.
:quality(50)/2023/07/07/64a7df4c5fe71_placeholder-36b69ec8.png)
Published
Reading time: 1 min
:quality(50)/2024/05/02/080-hl-alevu-2368145-6633672c10021350033709.jpg)
“We believe that an elected official under investigation should be suspended from office,” declared Thursday May 2 on France Bleu Roussillon, the local representative of the anti-corruption association Anticor, two days after the indictment of the mayor of Barcarès (Pyrénées-Orientales). “Alain Ferrand is still presumed innocent and he is elected by the people, so he can theoretically continue to hold his position, including in prison. But in our opinion, this should not be the case”specifies the association, which campaigns for candidates in each election to be obliged to present a clean criminal record.
Alain Ferrand was indicted on Tuesday for “corruption by a publicly elected official”, “favoritism”, “illegal taking of interests”, “participation in a criminal association”, “money laundering” and “undeclared transfer of sums from from abroad”. This follows the opening of a judicial investigation concerning the management of public contracts relating to the municipality’s Christmas villages between 2012 and 2024. The elected official was placed in pre-trial detention.
A “relentlessness”, according to the mayor’s lawyer
According to the mayor’s lawyer, Jean-Robert Phung, it is a question of‘”a relentlessness”. He denounces “a 48-hour interrogation in one-way police custody” and announces to appeal. The lawyer recalls that “for 20 years” his clientt “was the subject of around twenty or thirty custody orders, five or six indictments, five or six referrals to the criminal court” and “all these procedures ended with dismissals, acquittals and dismissals.”
Alain Ferrand, 64, mayor of Barcarès for the first time in 1995, is also being prosecuted in another case linked to the organization of the town’s Christmas village. Initially scheduled for March 6, his trial was postponed until June 19, 2025. In this case also investigated by the JIRS (specialized interregional jurisdictions) of Marseille, Alain Ferrand is suspected of several irregularities in the organization of the Christmas market during winter 2018-2019. Alain Ferrand has also already been convicted on several occasions by the courts, notably for misuse of corporate assets in 1999, and for tax evasion in 2001.
