A former head of France's foreign intelligence service will face trial for complicity in attempted extortion, after a businessman accused agents of trying to squeeze him for €15 million.
Bernard Bajolet, who led the DGSE spy agency from 2013 to 2017, must appear in a criminal court outside Paris, a judge said, in an October 23 ruling seen by Agence France-Presse (AFP), on Tuesday, October 29.
He will face a charge of arbitrarily infringing on individual freedom as a holder of public office. There was "sufficient evidence" that Bajolet was involved "by giving instructions to enter into a conversation" in which it was "more than likely that pressure would be applied," the judge found.
The case focuses on a conversation at Paris's Charles de Gaulle airport between two agents and businessman Alain Dumenil, a longstanding bugbear of the DGSE. Dumenil, a French-Swiss dual national involved in numerous legal cases and business disputes, was stopped by police as he prepared to embark on a flight to Geneva in March 2016.
They brought him to the airport police station where two plain-clothes DGSE agents told him he must reimburse the French state €15 million ($16.2 million). The sum stems from a transaction the DGSE entered into with Dumenil, in the late 2000s.
In a practice aimed at shielding the agency from the risk of foreign occupation or other harm to the government, the spy outfit runs a business empire partly hidden from public or parliamentary scrutiny. Security sources have told AFP that the precise size of the DGSE's holdings is not officially known.
One company in which the DGSE and Dumenil had both invested was put into administration, while Dumenil himself was later charged over his own bankruptcy. Since then, the agency has insisted the businessman owes it the €15 million sum, which includes €3 million of interest.
Dumenil claims that, during the 2016 encounter, the DGSE agents threatened him in a bid to recover the money, including by showing him pictures of himself and his family in both Switzerland and Britain. They left when he said he would file a criminal complaint, he added.
Barjolet told the investigating magistrate that he agreed only to his agents interviewing Dumenil at the airport, but did not give detailed instructions as to its content.
"Beyond the trial of Bernard Bajolet, this will be the trial of the DGSE and the twisting of its work to private ends," Dumenil's lawyers William Bourdon and Nicolas Huc-Morel said in a statement after the judge's ruling.
The DGSE declined to comment on an open legal case.