The former Monaco investigating judge targeted by Dupond-Moretti finally cleared – Liberation
The Superior Council of the Judiciary (CSM) on Thursday cleared the former investigating judge of Monaco, Edouard Levrault, against whom disciplinary proceedings had been initiated by the executive, at the initiative of the Keeper of the Seals Eric Dupond- Moretti.
This magistrate “has not exceeded the limits of his freedom of expression. Therefore, no disciplinary breach can be blamed on him.indicates the CSM in its decision, adding that Edouard Levrault had spoken “in a non-excessive manner, without disclosing secret information, on a subject of general interest”.
Shortly after his appointment to the Chancellery in the summer of 2020, Eric Dupond-Moretti had launched administrative investigations against four magistrates, in particular Edouard Levrault, with whom he had dealt as a lawyer and whose methods he had denounced. “cowboy”. It is the triggering of these investigations that has caused the Minister of Justice to be indicted today for “illegal taking of interests”.
The Minister of Justice reproached Edouard Levrault for failing to “his duties of reserve and delicacy” for remarks made in a television report about his files in Monaco, after the non-renewal of his secondment by the authorities of the Principality. He was also initially accused of having “violated the secrecy of the instruction” during this same television report. A grief finally abandoned at the time of the referral to the CSM by the Prime Minister at the time Jean Castex, who had provided these files to deal with the possible conflict of interest of Eric Dupond-Moretti.
facades
At the hearing at the end of August, the services of Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne called on the CSM to “hold back the sorrows” against Edouard Levrault while considering “that there (was) no reason for sanctions”. The magistrate, now vice-president of the Nice judicial court, had assured him that he had “failed in his duties as a magistrate neither in Monaco nor in France”.
The three other disciplinary investigations initiated by the targeted executive of the magistrates of the national financial prosecutor’s office who had had the detailed telephone bills (“fadettes”) of lawyers, including Eric Dupond-Moretti, peeled through to identify a possible mole in the affair of the listening involving Nicolas Sarkozy. The former head of the National Financial Prosecutor’s Office, Eliane Houlette, must thus compare before the disciplinary training on September 26 and 27, a few days after her former deputy Patrice Amar. A first magistrate Ulrika Delaunay-Weiss was definitively cleared by the CSM.