The sanction has been delivered in the corruption case involving tax officials in Nigeria, Cameroon, and Equatorial Guinea in 2011 and 2012. Gaël Bodénès, the head of the maritime assistance specialist to the offshore oil sector, Bourbon Group, has been implicated.
On Friday, July 12, Gaël Bodénès was sentenced by French justice to two years of suspended imprisonment and a three-year ban on managing a company for bribing tax officials in three African countries. Judges were convinced, thanks to messages found and included in the file, that the Bourbon Group or its partners had indeed paid bribes during tax adjustments in Nigeria, Cameroon, and Equatorial Guinea in 2011 and 2012. According to the court, "it was at the group level that the decision was made and the expected benefit identified."
The judges determined that these decisions to pay illegal sums – more than 3 million dollars in total – were made within Bourbon's Executive Committee (Comex) by its three then-deputy managing directors. Gaël Bodénès, Laurent Renard, and Christian Lefevre are thus identified as the "perpetrators of corruption offenses." The first two were sentenced to two years of suspended imprisonment, a fine of 80,000 euros, and a "ban on holding social mandates, managing, or directing a commercial company for three years."
Christian Lefevre received a 30-month suspended prison sentence due to an additional conviction for concealed work related to certain activities transferred to a company he managed. The Marseille prosecutor's office had requested sentences of one to 18 months in prison against these three Comex members.
A central figure in this case, Marc Cherqui, former tax director of Bourbon, was sentenced to six months of suspended imprisonment and a 30,000-euro customs fine. It was the discovery of a sum of 250,000 dollars in his suitcase at Marseille airport in October 2012, upon his return from Nigeria, that triggered the case. The court ordered the confiscation of this sum "indissociably linked to corruption," considering that Cherqui was bringing it back "for his own account and benefit."
The court justified his lighter sentence than the three years in prison, including eighteen months suspended, demanded by the prosecution by the "great transparency with investigators and justice" demonstrated by Cherqui. He was the only one of the eight defendants tried in May to recognize and assume the facts.
The Bourbon Group, which now employs more than 5,900 people in 38 countries, announced through its lawyer, Patrick Maisonneuve, that it would appeal this conviction pronounced by the Marseille correctional court (southeast), where the company is headquartered.
