Fourteen people, including two former sector mayors of the Les Républicains (LR) party in Marseille, will be tried in September for the affair of dubious proxies which marked the 2020 municipal election during which the city finally shifted to the left . The trial will be held from September 23 to 27 in the extraordinary trial room of the Marseille judicial court, it was announced during a pre-trial hearing on Friday.
These people linked to the camp of Martine Vassal, unsuccessful LR candidate for town hall and current president of the Metropolis, are accused, to varying degrees, of having “implemented a system known as simplified proxies”. These were validated by a police commander from the 12th arrondissement police station, without the presence of the principals, or even without their agreement.
Yves Moraine and Julien Ravier in the dock
In total, 194 illegal powers of attorney had been produced, including around fifty for residents of the Saint-Barnabé nursing home in the 12th arrondissement, some suffering from illnesses such as Alzheimer’s, according to a summary report of which AFP obtained a copy. . Three elected officials, a nursing home director, political and community activists and a police commander will be in the dock, unless they request an appearance procedure by then upon prior admission of guilt.
Among them are the former Les Républicains mayor of the 6th and 8th arrondissements (4th sector) Yves Moraine and the former LR mayor of the 11th and 12th arrondissements (6th sector) and ex-MP Julien Ravier, declared ineligible for one year in 2022 due to this file.
Both dispute the facts, with Mr. Moraine only acknowledging an “aggressive” policy of collecting proxies. Béatrice Pefetti, one of some 194 victims identified, was “fallen from the clouds” when she received a summons barely a month ago for this hearing. Until this letter, she had absolutely no idea that someone had voted for her and her husband, who has since died, in the first round of 2020, in the midst of the Covid epidemic.
She was then in a nursing home after heart surgery. “It’s shenanigans, it’s mafia,” protests this dapper septuagenarian. “How did they do it? Does this happen frequently? I think that when they looked at the voting lists, they said to themselves that my partner and I had not voted,” she wonders.