The French Minister of Culture, Rachida Dati, has been campaigning in Paris for weeks for the municipal elections to be held in March 2026, despite the fact that she is still a member of the Government. However, a new judicial front may hinder. This Thursday, agents from the central office for the fight against corruption and financial crimes, of the judicial police, carried out several searches in the offices of the ministry he directs and also in their homes, as confirmed by the financial prosecutor’s office (PNF, in its French acronym).
The investigations have to do with an investigation into alleged corruption that opened in mid-October – different from the one that was already underway against her and that will take her to trial next year – and that tries to clarify the activities of Rachida Dati when she was an MEP (2009-2019).
The investigation points to possible charges of active and passive corruption, influence peddling, embezzlement of public funds and money laundering. Investigators suspect that he received two transfers worth 299,000 euros from the company GDF Suez (renamed Engie) between 2010 and 2021, which he did not declare. I was then an MEP and it is mandatory to do so to avoid a conflict of interest. The head of Culture, who at that time also worked as a lawyer, denied having had GDF Suez as a client.
As revealed by France television and Nouvel Obs, in the records the investigators have seized a notebook with the annotations “GDF 250” and “Renault 300” that “could correspond to the transfers” that he is suspected of receiving, according to both media.
In the autumn of 2026, Rachida Dati will have to answer to the judges, referring to the alleged collection of improper payments by the Renault automobile company between 2010 and 2012. It is suspected that she received 900,000 euros for consulting work that was not carried out, also when she was an MEP. The judges believe that they were actually hiding works of lobbyprohibited for elected officials. She will be tried for this in September 2026, after the municipal elections, which are held in March and to which Dati is running as a candidate for Los Republicanos.
Dati, who is also councilor of the VII arrondissement of Paris, aspires to succeed Anne Hidalgo in Paris. , after her defeat in June 2020 against the socialist, who is no longer going to run.
The minister’s judicial imbroglios could ruin her efforts, since she has been very involved in her municipal career for weeks: she has visited homeless people, she has put on a street sweeper’s suit and she has joined the cause of hospitality in the bars in the Parisian neighborhood of Le Marais. According to the latest poll carried out by the Ipsos company for the newspaper Le Parisien, the left-wing coalition of Emmanuel Grégoire, Hidalgo’s successor, would slightly advance Rachida Dati in the first electoral round.
