After more than three hours in police custody, the mayor of Saint-Étienne is released and wants to continue his mandate.
The LR mayor of Saint-Etienne and president of the Saint-Etienne metropolis, Gaël Perdriau, splashed by a political blackmail scandal within his municipality, rules out stepping back or resigning, his lawyer told AFP on Thursday 15 september.
He has not “in no case planned to withdraw from his duties“, as requested by several local or national elected officials from his camp and local economic actors: and “there would be no legal justification for him to resign“, declared to AFP Me Christophe Ingrain. “Gaël Perdriau is at work in the city as well as in the metropolis on all issues, serving the two communities and the inhabitants, with the same determination.”, also indicates a press release from his cabinet.
The mayor is released from custody
“He emerged free from three and a half hours of police custody without any action taken by the courts against him.“, underlined his lawyer by qualifying”heartbreaking» the many hostile reactions among the Republicans and by criticizing the exclusion procedure launched by LR.
The 50-year-old elected official was placed in police custody on Tuesday in Lyon as part of investigations into the filming and use of a video shot in January 2015 in which we see Gilles Artigues, his ex-first deputy and ex-deputy known for his Catholic commitment, being massaged by a man in a hotel room in Paris. The objective was to politically neutralize this centrist.
“Neither the mayor nor I are the sponsors of this video“, said Wednesday his chief of staff in an interview with the local television channel TL7, saying to himself “serene about the sequence of events“.
An open judicial inquiry
The case broke at the end of August when the news site Mediapart published the detailed confessions of a former close friend of the municipal team on a “smearing of mannersorganized according to him at the request of the mayor and his relatives. The filming of the compromising video was, according to him, paid for via fictitious services invoiced to two local cultural associations subsidized by the town hall.
The Lyon public prosecutor’s office has opened a judicial investigation for “invasion of privacy, aggravated blackmail, embezzlement of public property by a person in charge of a public function, breach of trust and concealment of these offenses“After a complaint from Gilles Artigues. The three investigating judges in charge of the case began to hear all the protagonists of this case, the complainant, the whistleblower, the mayor, his chief of staff, the education assistant and four heads of cultural associations for the financial side of the deal.
.
