Pinned by the Anti-Corruption Agency, Marseille adopts a code of good conduct

"These two charters lay down the clear principles on which the ethics of elected municipal officials and city officials", detailed Friday during a city council Olivia Fortin, deputy mayor responsible for the transparency of public life.

"They will allow elected officials and agents to have a base on which to lean when they have questions or encounter difficulties" and will be the subject of specific training, she added.

The adoption of such a "code of conduct" was one of the priority recommendations made by the French Anti-Corruption Agency (AFA) in a control report issued in July and consulted by AFP.

During this audit, carried out from September 2020 to February 2021, just after the accession to business of a new left-wing majority after 25 years in office of the right-wing mayor Jean-Claude Gaudin, the AFA noted "an insufficient culture probity within the services "of the city," reinforced by the absence of an adequate disciplinary regime ".

This lack of probity is illustrated in particular, according to the report, by "the current practice of family recruitments" or "the large number of officials who have been the subject of criminal complaints for acts of breaches of probity".

The management of Marseille under the Gaudin mandates had already been severely pinned down by the regional chamber of accounts. Since 2019, a judicial investigation is also in progress for "embezzlement of public funds by a person in charge of a public service mission, and concealment of this offense".

The charter of elected officials adopted Friday "provides (...) for example the commitment to resign in the event of a final criminal conviction for felony or misdemeanor," said Ms. Fortin.

Another black point highlighted by the AFA report: "The process of issuing town planning authorizations presents serious areas of risk of undermining integrity that are not controlled in the absence of any written procedure governing the activity. of service ".

Finally, the AFA also points to "the absence of any effective control over the acts of the sector town halls (recruitment of temporary workers, purchases of transferable goods, allocation of social housing), which could have led to abuses during the previous term of office ".

She thus recalls that the central town hall did not take any disciplinary measures, did not report or file any complaint after an administrative investigation that revealed the misuse of fuel cards at the town hall of the 13th and 14th arrondissements, held by the National Gathering, between 2015 and 2018.

"Never a Scandinavian city"

"The observation of this report is sad. (...) This city, Marseille, it is bright but it also has its dark side and this report cruelly reveals it", commented Fabien Perez, from the environmental and citizen group, considering that the code of ethics "symbolically acts a new direction in the relationship that elected officials have to the general interest".

The AFA report recalls that "the control of the municipality of Marseille took place concomitantly with the installation of a new municipal majority putting an end to a cycle of four terms of office" and that "this new majority included in its program a proactive policy in the fight against breaches of probity ".

These charters are "the first stone of something which will allow this city to reconnect with what it should be, a big city, open, transparent, democratic, intelligent, with its faults of course, we will never become a city Scandinavian, and so it is, ”said the mayor of Marseille, Benoît Payan.

During his municipal victory in July 2020, at the head of the left-wing coalition of the "Marseille Spring", Michèle Rubirola, who resigned five months later in favor of the socialist Benoît Payan, had promised "the end of clanism, of nepotism and patronage "in Marseille, one of the poorest and most unequal cities in France.