France's Ex-Intelligence Chief Convicted in Influence Peddling Trial Involving LVMH
A Paris court on Friday found France's former intelligence chief, Bernard Squarcini, guilty of using public resources to benefit the French luxury giant LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton in a trial that shed light on how the company sought to shield its public image for years.
Mr. Squarcini, who oversaw France's spy agency from 2008 to 2012, was hired as a security consultant by LVMH upon leaving his government post. The court ruled that he had abused his power several times to assist the company. It gave him a four-year prison sentence, with two years under house arrest and two years suspended, and ordered him to pay a fine of 200,000 euros, or about 217,000 dollars. His lawyer said he would appeal the ruling.
Among other things, the court found Mr. Squarcini complicit in a bizarre illegal surveillance operation that LVMH conducted on François Ruffin, a gadfly French journalist who began making an unflattering documentary in 2012 about the company and its chief executive, the French billionaire Bernard Arnault.
Though the company was not among the defendants, the two-week trial took an unexpected turn in November when the head judge requested Mr. Arnault to testify as a witness.
In the packed Paris courtroom, the corporate magnate portrayed himself as a successful business leader who had labored to turn LVMH into the world's top luxury conglomerate, with 75 brands, including Louis Vuitton and Dior, and 200,000 employees worldwide. When Mr. Arnault first took over the company in the 1980s, it had just 10,000 employees.
He denied ever knowing of any illegal surveillance.
Mr. Squarcini was tried alongside nine other defendants — mostly civil servants, police officers and consultants. Two of them were found not guilty.
As the main defendant in the case, Mr. Squarcini was convicted of myriad offenses, including mishandling classified information and complicity in the unauthorized activity of a private investigator. He was found not guilty on a range of other charges.
In its verdict, the court said Mr. Squarcini had, in particular, 'misappropriated state resources in order to satisfy the clandestine concerns' of his key client, LVMH.The court added that Mr. Squarcini had 'designed and validated a system of close surveillance' of Mr. Ruffin and a satirical publication that he headed, Fakir, whose staff members helped make the film, 'Merci Patron,' which portrayed Mr. Arnault as a symbol of corporate greed.
'The court handed down severe sentences, but with a severity commensurate with the seriousness of the attacks made by Mr. Squarcini and his acolytes on freedom of the press, freedom of expression, the rights of Francois Ruffin and the rights of the Fakir newspaper,' Benjamin Sarfati, Mr. Ruffin's lawyer, said in an interview on Thursday. 'But we would have liked LVMH to be on trial, because the people convicted today acted at LVMH's request,' he added.
In 2021, LVMH settled with a French court to avoid criminal prosecution in connection with the inquiry into Mr. Squarcini by paying a €10 million fine. The company declined to comment on the verdict. Mr. Ruffin praised it.
'Proud that we resisted the collusion of France's number one fortune and its number one cop,' Mr. Ruffin wrote in French on X on Friday. 'The luxury group makes magic dresses. But it has its feet in the mud of gutter espionage, with infringements on freedom of expression and privacy.'
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