A pan-African collective has filed a complaint against the Bolloré group, French billionaire Vincent Bolloré, and his son Cyrille for receiving stolen goods and laundering assets in connection with several port concessions managed by the company until the sale of its African activities in 2022, AFP learned on Wednesday.

Funding of election campaigns, politicians appointed as directors of the group's subsidiaries, contracts awarded without calls for tender: these practices, documented in at least five African countries, "likely constitute the visible face of a Bolloré system," the plaintiffs claim.

Emblematic of the Bolloré group, its logistics branch in Africa employed more than 20,000 people in more than 20 countries on the African continent and notably owned a network of 16 port concessions, warehouses and road and rail hubs.

In an unprecedented move, around ten associations based in Togo, Guinea, Ghana, Ivory Coast and Cameroon, brought together within the collective "Restitution for Africa (RAF)" and supported by an international consortium of lawyers, are denouncing the way in which the Bolloré group obtained and then managed major port concessions there over the past twenty years.

The alleged concealment concerns the group's activities in Cameroon, Ghana, and Ivory Coast, according to the complaint reviewed by AFP. Togo and Guinea are also implicated in the alleged money laundering charge.

Contacted by AFP, the Bolloré group did not immediately respond.

In the case of the ports of Lomé (Togo) and Conakry (Guinea), the French courts, already involved since 2013, suspected the Bolloré group of having used the political consultancy activities of its subsidiary Euro RSCG (now Havas) to fraudulently assist the 2010 presidential campaigns of Faure Gnassingbé and Alpha Condé, for the benefit of a flagship subsidiary at the time, Bolloré Africa Logistics.

The group negotiated a settlement under which it paid a €12 million fine in exchange for the prosecution being dropped. However, the financial prosecutor's office has requested that Vincent Bolloré be tried for corruption and complicity in breach of trust in 2024.

"The group has already acknowledged that some of these activities took place. Is this just the tip of the iceberg?" asks Parisian lawyer Antoine Vey.

Concerning the ports of Douala and Kribi (Cameroon), Tema (Ghana) and Abidjan (Ivory Coast), the new complaint concerns alleged acts of "concealment" of favouritism, influence peddling or even illegal taking of interest, offences allegedly committed by local political or administrative officials, but thanks to which the group knowingly obtained container terminal concessions.

- Target "the corrupter" -

A report by Cameroon's National Anti-Corruption Commission, cited in the complaint, for example, mentions €60 million in royalties and fines collected by the Bolloré group in connection with its concessions in Douala and Kribi, which it allegedly "retained" instead of paying them to the state.

In Ghana, in 2014, the Bolloré/Maersk consortium allegedly convinced President John Dramani Mahama "to award the Tema port contract to its ad hoc company, Meridian Port Service, in secret and without a call for tenders," even though 56 companies were already positioned, according to the complaint. The method used to calculate the port's operating life also allegedly led to "a net loss of $4.1 billion for Ghana."

In 2003, the award of the Abidjan container terminal by President Laurent Gbagbo by mutual agreement for 15 years also sparked outrage among the Ivorian opposition, with the World Bank country director describing it as "a contract that fundamentally deviates from the principles of good governance," the plaintiffs add.

The other aspect of the complaint concerns the alleged "laundering" of profits from concessions obtained in a presumably fraudulent manner in the five aforementioned countries. Grouped within Bolloré Africa Logistics, these concessions constitute, according to the plaintiffs, "a substantial part of the enterprise value of this subsidiary, which was sold in 2022 for €5.7 billion" to the Italian-Swiss shipping company MSC.

"This complaint focuses on the corruptors, that is to say those through whom, in fact, the money is injected into territories in which, subsequently, it is laundered," whereas the so-called "ill-gotten gains" cases have until now mainly targeted African leaders who have enriched themselves personally, Mr. Vey emphasized to AFP.

The goal? "To target the dirty money received by the corruptor and return it to the African people who have been wronged," explains Jean-Jacques Lumumba, head of the RAF collective.

This money, he says, "means fewer hospitals, fewer schools, fewer roads, fewer infrastructure projects. And it's a future that we're taking away from our young people."

The plaintiffs hope to see the application of the 2021 French law, which allows development projects in foreign countries to be financed using assets seized in cases of "ill-gotten gains."