After a decade spent at President Emmanuel Macron's side, Alexis Kohler, who is planning to join a bank, officially announced his decision to resign from the president's service in mid-April, according to a March 27 statement from the Elysée.
According to the statement, Kohler is set to be replaced by Emmanuel Moulin, who used to be former prime minister Gabriel Attal's chief of staff. The information obtained by Le Monde confirms elements first revealed by Le Figaro newspaper.
Chief of staff to former economy minister Pierre Moscovici, and then to Macron when he was himself minister of the economy under then-president François Hollande, Kohler has been the Elysée's chief of staff since Macron was first elected president, in May 2017.
Kohler, the president's right-hand man, has been under investigation since 2022 for an alleged illegal conflict of interest, in the case of his family's links with ship-owning firm MSC. While working as a senior civil servant from 2009 to 2016, he is suspected of having taken part in several decisions relating to the Italian-Swiss shipping company, which is run by his cousins of his mother, the Aponte family.
On February 19, the Assemblée Nationale's Finance Committee gave its president, Eric Coquerel, authorization to initiate criminal proceedings against Kohler, as the Elysée's chief of staff, if he refused to be interrogated again. The Finance Committee obtained the powers of a commission of inquiry for six months, and, in early December, launched its efforts to investigate the "causes" of the "variation" and "discrepancies in tax and budget forecasts" noted over 2023 and 2024.
Kohler will also have to explain himself to a Sénat inquiry commission looking into a mineral water fraud case. As Le Monde and Radio France revealed in January 2024, and as Nestlé has since admitted, for several years the world's number one bottled water company used prohibited water treatment techniques – microfiltration, ultraviolet (UV) filters and activated carbon – to deal with bacterial or chemical contamination at its Perrier production site in southern France, as well as at its site in the Vosges department, on the German border, where Hépar, Contrex and Vittel waters are drawn from.
Moreover, against the advice of the General Health Directorate, the government gave the Swiss giant the go-ahead, in February 2023, to continue using a microfiltration system that did not comply with regulations.
Translation of an original article published in French on lemonde.fr; the publisher may only be liable for the French version.