Alexandre Benalla’s legal troubles are far from over. The former collaborator of Emmanuel Macron, who was sentenced last November to one year in prison – he appealed – for violence committed on the sidelines of a demonstration on May 1, 2018, has been taken into police custody this Tuesday morning by the Parisian judicial police, learns 20 minutes from a source close to the case.
According to the newspaper Point, who revealed the information, the former Elysee mission manager is heard by investigators from the economic crime repression squad about the security contract signed by Vincent Crase – a former gendarme and former employee of La République en Marche – with the Russian oligarch Iskander Makhmudov.
Suspicion of “corruption”
Mediapart revealed in December 2018 the existence of this contract, subcontracted to another security company, the company Velours, for which Alexandre Benalla worked between October 2014 and November 2015. The latter would have been responsible for negotiating this contract, this which he denied during his hearing before the Senate in 2019. According to the investigation site, Iskander Makhmudov would have paid 294,000 euros for this contract, of which a little more than half – 172,200 euros – was transferred to the accounts of Velvet. The investigation relates in particular to suspicions of “corruption”.
Iskander Makhmudov, billionaire at the head of an industrial empire in Russia and also holder of several properties in France, has been the subject of an investigation in Spain on suspicion of belonging to a powerful criminal organization. But the file was sent to Russia in 2011 and was the object of a classification without continuation, according to the public prosecutor of Madrid.