“They distributed bribes to win contracts in Indonesia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the Bahamas. In all, Alstom paid tens of millions of dollars in bribes, to get 4 billion in contracts, and 300 million in profits. Alstom has agreed to plead guilty, admit wrongdoing, and pay a fine of 772 million dollars. “ This is, in December 2014, the indictment delivered to the press by the American prosecutors, “the conclusion of a historic investigation, which marks the end of a system of corruption that has lasted more than ten years, a system developed and concealed by Alstom”.
This investigation was conducted on the basis of an anti-corruption law sometimes accused of being an economic weapon in the service of American interests. Since 1998, the FCPA (Foreign Corrupt Practices Act), the law against corrupt practices outside the United States, allows American courts to prosecute all over the world leaders who are not in their own country. In France, Alstom has never been questioned for corruption: at the time, the practice of bribes, or rather “commissions”, was not uncommon.
The sale of Alstom Energie against the abandonment of the proceedings?
If the investigation is historic, the fine is too – even if it does not reach the billion initially announced. Anyway, it closes the proceedings against the leaders of the French multinational. What revive certain suspicions about its CEO at the time, Patrick Kron? Would he have negotiated with the American justice the sale of Alstom Energie to General Electric against the abandonment of the proceedings?
Arnaud Montebourg, then Minister of the Economy, Productive Recovery and Digital (during his interview for “Sensitive Affairs”, he had not yet announced his candidacy for the presidential election of 2022), is convinced of this: “He traded the sale of Alstom for his personal immunity. When you sell your country, because Alstom is a piece of France, to save you, you are a traitor …“Charges that Patrick Kron refutes, recalling that “justice had no element against [lui], neither in the United States nor elsewhere “.
In fact, confirms Robert Luskin, at the time American lawyer for Alstom, “in most of these cases very senior executives are rarely questioned. Those who are prosecuted are the managers who can be directly linked to the embezzlement“. It is indeed an Alstom executive, Frédéric Pierucci, who was arrested and imprisoned on American soil. And he too is convinced that there was collusion, as he testifies for” Sensitive affairs ” .
A “plead guilty” agreement signed on the day the sale is approved
According to him, the American authorities would have even waited for the sale of Alstom to be definitively approved to close the case. Is it really a coincidence that the “plead guilty” agreement with the Department of Justice, the US Department of Justice, was signed on the same day?
In 2018, a parliamentary commission of inquiry (chaired by MP LR Olivier Marleix) also sought to know whether the CEO would not have sold Alstom Energie to settle the American fine … and whether there would have been collusion between American justice and General Electric to monopolize Alstom. According to the findings, issued in April 2018, “there is no factual element to corroborate the theory according to which General Electric would have used these legal proceedings to facilitate the takeover of Alstom“.
Extract from “Alstom Affair: the Secret War”, an investigation by Sylvain Pak and Gaël Hubert to see on October 21, 2021 in “Sensitive Affairs”, magazine presented by Fabrice Drouelle and co-produced by France Télévisions, France Inter and INA d ‘ after the original broadcast of France Inter.
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