The Mayors of Crime and Corruption

Now I’m not terribly aux-fait with local politics but I have learned over the years that local mayors in French towns and villages have a significant amount of power. They obviously have influence, but it’s the absolute power which causes the problems. It’s the ability they seem to have to make major financial and commercial decisions without any recourse to committees, or if they do hold meetings, the committees are generally made up of their cronies, family members and owners of commercial premises in the area who owe their existence to the mayor in the first place.

A fellow blogger recently wrote a couple of postings about the mayoral shenanigans in his village where a library assistant was drafted into the mayor’s office to cover for the normal secretary who was off ill on a long-term basis. She discovered a few financial irregularities with the cash which comes in from a ‘professional tax’ which is levied on local businesses and goes into the mayor’s coffers, for him to fund local projects as he/she sees fit. As you can imagine, mayors up and down the length of France must be tempted to do all sorts of weird and wonderful things with this cash, but sticking it in their own bank accounts is not one which the locals approve of. His guy was caught out and has just resigned but it’s not just Hicksville mayors who are a bit dodgy.  

 In the second half of the 20th century, Nice bore the influence of mayor Jean  Medicin (mayor for 33 years from 1928 to 1943 and 1947 to 1965) and his son Jacques (mayor for 24 years from 1966 to 1990). Jacques had been out of office for about 10 years when I arrived down here but he was still being investigated for suspicious dealings on large, public works contracts which were awarded to companies, who were, in return, quite kind, in a financial sense to the guy who awarded them their multi-million euro contracts. Jacqes Médecin fled France in 1990 and was arrested in Uruguay in 1993, leading to his extradition in 1994. He was then convicted of several counts of corruption and associated crimes and sentenced to prison.

Now don’t get the impression that this is an isolated case. This is happening all over France. Mayors up and down the country are being investigated, are being tried or are in the clink over financial irregularities. A simple ‘French Mayor Corruption’ typed into Google returns 892,000 results!

And it goes all the way to the top. Jacques Chirac, the last French President is being investigated for embezzlement when he was Mayor of Paris. He, allegedly, paid hundreds of council workers who were on the payroll. Thing was – none of them existed and you can, I’m sure, work out where the money went!  

So far our mayor, Mr Bertaina seems to have behaved himself, although he summarily closed down the building of our house for nearly a year because he was not happy with it and then summoned J and I to his office for a ‘dressing down’, not one word of which I understood but I had been warned not to argue and just take the verbal punishment otherwise he could stop the building permanently. And all of this happened without a single other member of the council being involved.

As I say, local mayors have enormous power. The power to allow certain types of establishment to open in their village, whilst other similar ones are refused. The power to use their ‘professional tax’ money to fund pet projects, which in most villages seems to be carried out by companies owned and run by friends and family members.

So for Tourrettes, it's so-far-so good. Let's just hope it stays that way. I'd just hate to see my hard earned cash improving the road down to the mayor's palatial villa! 

PS - the picture is of the Hotel de Ville (Town Hall) in Vence, our local town where I'm sorry to report that the mayor has just been jailed for 9 years for abusing his grandson.