Sports Minister Amélie Oudéa-Castera is the subject of a judicial investigation at the Court of Justice of the Republic (CJR) after a defamation complaint by the former French football boss Noël Le Graët, AFP learned on Friday from judicial source. The commission of instruction of the CJR, the only jurisdiction empowered to judge ministers in the exercise of their function, has been seized since June 21 of the procedure triggered by Le Graët after remarks by the minister in February on his management of the French Football Federation (FFF).
Asked by AFP, Le Graët’s lawyer, Me Thierry Marembert, declined to comment. Noël Le Graët resigned in February with a bang from the FFF, which he had led since 2011, after a damning audit report from the General Inspectorate for Education, Sport and Research (IGESR) on his management, amid accusations of sexual harassment.
A few hours after his departure, his lawyer had announced a complaint, claiming that Oudéa-Castera had “lied” on this report and pointing to a difference between the summary of the document, published on February 15 and which evoked the sending by Le Graët of “ambiguous SMS for some and clearly sexual in nature for others”, and its entirety.
The report was never made public.
According to an extract, consulted at the time by AFP, the inspection mission had noted “a small number of writings (SMS in particular) produced by Le Graët, using ambiguous formulations which could receive different interpretations and a vocabulary not including no term of a sexual nature”. The press law procedure makes it almost automatic, after a defamation complaint, the referral to an investigating judge and the indictment of the author of the remarks, the substantive debate taking place at the hearing. .
However, the case law is different before the CJR. In 2014, its requests committee had thus closed a complaint for defamation by the controversial polemicist Dieudonné against Manuel Valls, then Minister of the Interior, considering from the outset that the offense of defamation was not sufficiently characterized.
Le Graët is the subject of a preliminary investigation for moral and sexual harassment opened by the Paris prosecutor’s office. The former director general of the FFF Florence Hardouin, heard in April in this investigation, filed a complaint against him. In addition to Oudéa-Castera, the Keeper of the Seals Eric Dupond-Moretti is the subject of proceedings at the CJR, which issued an order in October sending him back to trial which he disputes.