Macron’s chief of staff can face conflict-of-interest trial, court rules

French President Emmanuel Macron’s chief of staff Alexis Kohler can be prosecuted over an alleged conflict of interest in a previous job, a Paris court ruled on Tuesday, November 26.

Kohler can be prosecuted on suspicion of illegally favoring a company to which he had family ties while working as a senior civil servant from 2009 to 2016, the Paris appeals court said, according to several people familiar with the case. He and two fellow accused still have the option of appealing the ruling.

The case revolves around Kohler’s links to ship-owning firm MSC, an Italian-Swiss company run by cousins of his mother, the Aponte family. Kohler is suspected of abusing his 2009-2012 job with a government agency managing the French state’s stakes in companies. The position meant he sat on boards at shipyard STX France (now named Chantiers de l’Atlantique) and the GPMH seaport in Le Havre.

In the following years, prosecutors suspect he weighed in on decisions affecting MSC while working in the Finance and Economy Ministry, including under then-minister Macron. Kohler’s defense has always been that he recused himself from decisions with any bearing on MSC and had been open with his superiors about the family connection “well beyond his obligations under ethics rules.”

His second argument is that many of the alleged acts date to before 2014 and have therefore passed the statute of limitations. On Tuesday, judges agreed with the investigating judges’ argument that Kohler may have undertaken “positive actions to conceal” his ties to MSC more recently, removing the statute of limitations defense.

Kohler’s co-accused are two former heads of the APE state investments agency, Bruno Bézard and Jean-Dominique Comolli, accused of helping Kohler with a cover-up. None of the defense lawyers nor the Anticor anti-corruption campaign group that first brought the case commented immediately on Tuesday’s decision.