Eleven associations denounce to the national financial prosecution facts of “concealment” and “money laundering” attributed to the subsidiary Bolloré Africa Logistics. The damage could be numerous, especially in five African countries.
Vincent Bolloré in turmoil. According to information from World And of AFP, the French billionaire is targeted by a complaint denouncing facts of concealment and money laundering, filed on Tuesday March 18 by a collective of 11 non -governmental organizations (NGO) of fighting for transparency in Africa, gathered under the collective “restitution for Africa” (RAF). Based in Togo, Guinea, Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire and Cameroon, these associations are targeting the company Bolloré SE, its owner, Vincent Bolloré, and his CEO, Cyrille Bolloré, the son of the industrialist.
Let us be interested in the supposed “whitening” of profits from concessions (grouped within Bolloré Africa Logistics) obtained in a presumed fraudulent manner in the African countries in question. In this file, the complainants indicate that the concessions represent “a substantial part of the business value of this subsidiary, which was sold in 2022 for an amount of 5.7 billion euros” to the Italo-Suisse MSC shipowner, it specifies.
A net loss of $ 4.1 billion for Ghana?
According to Jean-Jacques Lumumba, at the head of the RAF collective, the final objective was to “target the dirty money which was perceived by the corrupter and return to the African peoples who were injured,” he said to AFP. To do this, the complaint “focuses on the corrupters”. In other words, those by which the money transit, which is injected into territories, then bleached.
Unfortunately, this money automatically means “fewer hospitals, fewer schools, fewer roads, fewer infrastructure projects. And this is a future that we are kidding to our young people,” he regrets. French legislation could now oblige Vincent Bolloré to finance development projects in foreign countries through a seizure of assets in cases of “poorly acquired goods”.
The complainants recall that in 2014, the Bolloré/Maersk consortium would have convinced President Vey “to award the contract of the port of Tema to his company Ad Hoc, Meridian Port Service, in a secret and without tender” in Ghana. However, according to the complaint, no less than 56 companies had already positioned themselves on the file. Ghana could deplore a net loss of $ 4.1 billion in this case.
Finally, eleven years earlier, in 2003, the allocation of the abidjan container terminal by President Laurent Gbagbo to the barre for 15 years was also in the eye of the cyclone, especially in that of the Ivorian opposition. At the time, the director of the World Bank spoke of a “contract which fundamentally derogated from the principles of good governance”. Although requested by the newspaper Le Monde, the lawyer for the Bolloré Olivier Baratelli group did not “consider it useful to react”.