French prosecutors have called for the former head of the country’s internal intelligence agency to stand trial on charges of influence peddling and forgery.
Bernard Squarcini, who was head of the DCRI agency – the French equivalent of MI5 – until 2012, is also accused of complicity in breaches of professional and judicial secrecy.
The case centres on accusations that Squarcini used French intelligence and police services to help private interests, among them the world’s largest luxury group LVMH, which hired him in 2013.
The so-called “Squarcini Affair” has dragged on for more than a decade. French media reported that prosecutors had recommended judges order a trial for the intelligence chief, nicknamed Le Squale (the shark), and 10 others, including a former appeal court judge, on 23 December.
The vast inquiry followed Squarcini’s move to the private sector after the then Socialist president François Hollande removed him as the country’s intelligence chief in 2012 for being too close to his predecessor, the right-wing president Nicolas Sarkozy.
Squarcini, 67, then set up a consulting firm, Kyrnos, offering business intelligence to clients, who included LVMH to which he is suspected of handing over confidential information.
Detectives accuse him of using his connections in the police and other security networks to access confidential information about live investigations. After a preliminary inquiry launched in 2011, Squarcini was officially put under investigation – the French equivalent of being charged – in 2016.
In June 2021, additional investigations were launched after claims he spied on François Ruffin, now an MP affiliated with the left-wing La France Insoumise (France Unbowed) party, and journalists involved in making a 2016 satirical documentary film called Merci Patron! (Thank you, boss!) about LVMH’s head Bernard Arnault, France’s richest man.
Squarcini has always denied any wrongdoing.
The magistrates overseeing the investigation will now decide whether to follow the public prosecutor’s recommendation and put Squarcini and the 10 co-defendants in the dock.
Although Arnault was interviewed as part of the complex police inquiry, his company will not be part of any eventual trial. In 2021, LVMH, which includes the Louis Vuitton and Christian Dior labels and champagne house Moët, paid a €10m (£8.8m) fine to settle claims it hired Squarcini to spy on private individuals. The payoff enabled the world’s largest luxury group to avoid a public trial, but the judge that ruled on the settlement said it did not imply any admission of guilt by LVMH and was not a judgment against the company.
The settlement reflects acknowledgment of “past shortcomings, that belong to the past”, said LVMH’s lawyer Jacqueline Laffont, speaking in a hearing before the decision was announced in 2021.
Lawyers William Bourdon and Vincent Brengarth, representing a former police officer who is a civil party to the latest case, said the prosecutor’s recommendation was “a decisive stage in an unusual case that involves the use of the intelligence services for private reasons”.
No timeframe has been given for the investigating magistrates’ decision on whether the case should go to trial.
