The exuberant Tal Hanan, the head of the Israeli disinformation consultancy Team Jorge, was showing clips of the BFM-TV nightly news anchor Rachid M'Barki on a computer screen, one day in December 2022. As the businessman and his colleagues were meeting with two undercover journalists, he boasted of being able to plant stories in media outlets around the world, including the French news channel.

One year after the publication of the investigation coordinated by Forbidden Stories, in partnership with Le Monde, the vast judicial procedure on foreign interference opened by the National Financial Prosecutor's Office is ongoing. In December 2023, M'Barki was indicted for breach of trust and passive private corruption. Today, the investigators are focusing on the role played by certain French lobbyists, including Jean-Pierre Duthion, also indicted for corruption.

Le Monde, Radio France and Forbidden Stories can confirm that Duthion, a former fixer in Syria, is the middleman suspected of soliciting the presenter to go on air with certain news items, on behalf of various employers, most of them working for Qatar, as first reported by Le Parisien.

After several hearings, M'Barki eventually admitted to the investigators that he had been paid on several occasions by Duthion, for a total at most of €8,000. Part of these funds, Le Monde had learned, came from the lobbyist Nabil Ennasri, who is under investigation in this case and suspected of having acted on behalf of Qatar in France. Ennasri is suspected of having paid Duthion €7,500 a month for almost a year.

Controlling an MP

M'Barki and Duthion have made a complete U-turn since their hearings by a parliamentary commission of inquiry into foreign interference at the start of 2023, during which they had denied any form of influence and above all any remuneration. This was at a time when a new fact-finding mission, this time on media interference, was made official by the cultural affairs committee. Duthion came to "a realization," explained his lawyer, Robin Binsard. "He now understands that he was the link in a system that went beyond him."

It was also through Duthion that another key figure in the case came to light: the environmentalist MP Hubert Julien-Laferrière. Shortly after the publication of Story Killers, the investigative website Mediapart revealed that Julien-Laferrière had had contacts with the lobbyist and had promoted, at the Assemblée Nationale, a strange crypto asset that was a scam.

Le Monde found that the two men met in 2020, with the lobbyist privately boasting of his control over the MP. For almost a year, Julien-Laferrière received a monthly salary of at least €5,000, most of which came from a Qatari embassy and the National Human Rights Committee, a Qatari state body. The money passed through intermediaries such as Ennasri and Duthion. Neither the MP – whose office was raided in the fall of 2023 – nor his lawyer wished to respond to requests for comment from Le Monde and Radio France.

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