For Jean-Christophe Picard, head of the Anticor association for the Alpes-Maritimes: “Already questionable in normal times, such an amount of expenses that are so non-essential becomes absolutely unbearable in times of crisis. We should not hesitate to sanction, at the polls, those elected officials who show the least concern for our money.”
After the controversies regarding the parliamentary reserve, which in 2012 allowed deputies and senators to “distribute” 134 million euros according to criteria often electoral, here is a new demonstration that politics must be reformed to eliminate any privilege to what increasingly resembles a true caste!
Jean-Christophe Picard, on this matter, does not refrain from expressing his strongest criticism: “In the Alpes-Maritimes, there are examples of everything that should not be done…
Thus, deputies Lionnel Luca (UMP) and Rudy Salles (UDI) used their envelopes in 2012 to subsidize several religious associations, in violation of the Constitution (“France is a Republic […] secular”) and the law of December 9, 1905, concerning the separation of Church and State (“The Republic […] does not subsidize any worship”).
But unfortunately, the waste does not stop there…
In its report on the situation and prospects of public finances, published on June 27, 2013, the Court of Auditors indeed provides some telling figures for the year 2012: “the sole item ‘advertising, public relations’ represents a financial mass of more than 1.5 billion euros and that of trips and receptions more than 308 million euros”!
The newspaper Le Monde has just delved deeper into the issue: “the 27 French regions spent 151 million euros on communication actions in 2012 […]. The Île-de-France region dedicated more than 18 million euros to it. For ‘trips, missions, and travel,’ the region spent 700,000 euros, much less than Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, which allocated more than 1.2 million euros to it despite having a total budget more than twice lower than that of the capital region.”
Other local authorities are not left out when it comes to throwing money out the window. The departments thus spent 214 million on their communication. As for the municipalities, they happily engulfed 923 million for the same item… which is in addition to the 214 million disbursed by the groupings of municipalities!
