African civil society teams have filed a grievance in opposition to French billionaire Vincent Bolloré, his son Cyrille and Bolloré Group for alleged cash laundering and concealment of what they declare are ill-gotten beneficial properties linked to port operations throughout Africa.
The grievance was submitted to the Nationwide Monetary Prosecutor’s Workplace in Paris on Tuesday by “Restitution pour l’Afrique” (RAF), a collective of 11 NGOs from six African international locations: Togo, Guinea, Cameroon, Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire and Democratic Republic of Congo.
The collective accuses the French conglomerate of systematically utilizing corrupt practices to safe profitable port concessions in no less than 5 African nations earlier than promoting its African logistics operations for €5.7 billion in 2022 to Swiss-Italian delivery big MSC.
“We try to sentence the Bolloré methodology, the practices and the system that was put in place to win elections and have pursuits and dividends by managing ports in Africa,” mentioned Jean-Jacques Lumumba, president of the RAF collective.
The grievance represents a brand new strategy by concentrating on these allegedly paying bribes quite than the standard give attention to African officers receiving them.
“This grievance focuses on the corrupters, that’s, these via whom cash is injected into territories the place it’s later laundered,” Paris-based lawyer Antoine Vey advised the French information company AFP.
Documented allegations
The grievance particulars allegations throughout a number of international locations. In Cameroon, a nationwide anti-corruption fee report cited within the grievance claims Bolloré Group withheld €60 million in charges and fines it ought to have paid to the state for its operations at Douala and Kribi ports.
In Ghana, Bolloré allegedly satisfied then-president John Dramani Mahama in 2014 to award a port contract “secretly and with out tender” regardless of 56 firms competing for the venture.
The grievance claims this resulted in “a web lack of $4.1 billion for Ghana”.
The 2003 no-bid award of the Abidjan container terminal in Côte d’Ivoire by then-president Laurent Gbagbo drew criticism, with the World Financial institution’s nation director describing it as “a contract that basically violates ideas of excellent governance”.
Practically 60 % of African youth need to to migrate due to corruption
This isn’t the primary time Bolloré’s African operations have confronted authorized scrutiny.
French authorities started investigating the corporate in 2013 over suspicions it used its political consulting subsidiary, Euro RSCG (now Havas), to assist presidents Faure Gnassingbé and Alpha Condé win their 2010 election campaigns in Togo and Guinea in trade for port concessions.
Bolloré settled a part of the case in 2021 by paying a €12 million nice. Nonetheless, in 2024, prosecutors requested a trial for Vincent Bolloré on expenses of corruption and complicity in breach of belief.
“The group has already acknowledged that a few of these actions passed off. Is that this the tip of the iceberg?” Vey requested.
Searching for restitution
The collective hopes the case will set off the applying of France’s 2021 regulation, which permits for the reallocation of seized belongings from corruption circumstances to fund growth tasks in affected international locations.
“The objective is to focus on soiled cash taken by the corrupter and return it to the African individuals who had been harmed,” Lumumba mentioned.
“This cash means fewer hospitals, fewer colleges, fewer roads, fewer infrastructure tasks. And it is a future that we’re taking away from our younger individuals.”
Till its 2022 sale to Swiss-Italian delivery big MSC, Bolloré Africa Logistics employed over 20,000 individuals throughout greater than 20 African international locations and operated 16 port concessions together with warehouses and transportation hubs.
