Published on : 11/05/2022 – 21:37Modified : 11/05/2022 – 21:38
The French Minister of Foreign Affairs, Jean-Yves Le Drian, is summoned by the Malian courts as part of an investigation into “attack on public property and other offenses” dating back to 2015, AFP learned on Wednesday. before a court in Bamako, in a context of very tense relations between France and Mali.
“The investigating judge of the second cabinet at the tribunal de grande instance of commune III of the district of Bamako (economic and financial pole) invites Mr. Jean-Yves Le Drian to report to his cabinet on Monday, June 20, 2022 for a matter concerning him”, specifies the summons, which was authenticated, Wednesday, May 11, to AFP by the Malian justice.
The Quai d’Orsay told AFP on Wednesday evening that it had not been informed. “No notification or information of any kind has reached us through the appropriate channels,” he assured.
A Malian judicial source specified that this investigation followed a complaint from a platform of several Malian civil society associations, called “Maliko” (“The cause of Mali”). “It’s a story of awarding a contract to manufacture Malian passports to a French company (to which) Le Drian’s son is linked,” added this source.
According to an official document consulted by AFP, the case dates from 2015, when Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta was president of Mali. At that time, a French company – Oberthur Technologies – obtained for about ten years the Malian biometric passport manufacturing market.
“Le Drian was Minister of Defense at the time. Did he support the file to defend a French company or its interests? This is basically what Malian justice is trying to understand. We are at the investigation stage “, another Malian judicial source told AFP.
For its part, the Maliko association (close to the junta currently in power in Mali), which filed a complaint and filed a civil action, made a document available to AFP. “The procedures and rules established by Malian legislation, in particular Decree No. 2015 – 06040 of September 25 on the public procurement code, were blithely violated when the aforementioned contract was awarded”, says the document which accompanies the complaint.
A summons that has “no legal basis” as it stands
Asked by AFP, a diplomatic source in Bamako said Wednesday “that to date, no complaint has reached the French Embassy in Bamako”.
Commenting on the case, a Malian magistrate, for her part, told AFP that “this summons” of the French minister as it stands has “no legal basis”.
Mali has been the scene since 2012 of operations by jihadist groups linked to Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State organization, as well as violence of all kinds perpetrated by self-proclaimed self-defense militias and bandits.
This violence, which started in the north in 2012, spread to the center, then to neighboring Burkina Faso and Niger. They caused thousands of civilian and military deaths as well as hundreds of thousands of displaced persons, despite the deployment of UN, French and African forces.
Relations between Bamako and Paris have continued to deteriorate in recent months, particularly since the arrival in Mali of paramilitaries from the Russian group Wagner.
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The Malian authorities – dominated by the military who came to power by force in August 2020 – announced in early May that they would end the 2014 cooperation treaty with Franceas well as the 2013 and 2020 agreements setting the legal framework for the presence of Barkhane and the grouping of European special forces Takuba, initiated by France.
With AFP