“Keep your nerves Mr. Rapporteur, let’s get to the bottom,” asserts Mohamed Sifaoui during his hearing Thursday by the Senate Committee of Inquiry into the Marianne Fund and suspicions of embezzlement of public funds. Particularly targeted by the journalist, the rapporteur Jean-François Husson, senator LR from Meurthe-et-Moselle, is at the heart of a virulent exchange filmed and broadcast by Public senat. We see Mohamed Sifaoui, whose association (USEPPM) for which he was director of operations was the main beneficiary of the fund, up to 355,000 euros, treating the rapporteur with contempt or even arrogance.
To specific questions from Jean-François Husson, the journalist replied as follows: “That’s what I’m doing, being as detailed as possible even if it bothers you because lunchtime is near”. Or even with the condescension that makes the hair stand on end: “Well, it’s happy that you finally understood”. Many others would have succumbed to the provocation and would have “stuck one” on Sifaoui, as he says himself, but not Senator Husson.
“Sifaoui tried to take us for a walk”
Asked by 20 minutes, Jean-François Husson says: “This commission of inquiry is being done in a somewhat delicate context with a not simple subject, asks the parliamentarian. We then started from the principle that we had to keep a line and unroll the chronology of events. “Except that Mohamed Sifaoui, but also Marlène Schiappa, auditioned the day before, are not the type to wait quietly to be asked a question.
“I feel very quickly that their will is to set the tempo, but it is not them to set it, they are the ones who are auditioned,” says Jean-François Husson. Sifaoui tried to take us for a ride. We asked him for facts, he gave us theory. Above all, the senator perceives that the journalist is trying to provoke him into going into the towers. “He said to himself “I will put one on him” and we will see what it will give, analyzes the rapporteur. He wanted to be the boxer with reach. But it’s not the sausage party and we had to keep the distance. »
Do not “feed the staging”
And in fact, Jean-François Husson manages to keep his calm and not fall into the trap set by Mohamed Sifaoui. The hearing being filmed and broadcast live, he claims not to have wanted to “feed the staging” of the journalist. He adds that his behavior was dictated by the desire “to be equal to the task and to the Assembly”.
But Jean-François Husson does not intend to crash. And during the hearing, he had firm reminders of Mohamed Sifaoui when he pushed the cork too far, while not giving up on his questions. “Never in my life do I lower my gaze,” he says. But for him, this offensive attitude is not “the right strategy”: “Afterwards he had an open table on BFMTV where he went off in his delirium, but in the end, it discredited him a lot. »