Frédéric Dupuch, former director of public security in Paris, chaired the jury for an examination open to officers. It is suspected of having favored a candidate, also suspended.
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The Ministry of the Interior would have gladly passed from this coincidence: while the police officially launched his recruitment campaign, a senior police officer and a police commander was suspended from their duties on Wednesday, May, on order express the director general of the national police, Frédéric Veaux, after the revelation, the day before, of doubts as to a possible cheating to an internal examination of the police. Both are strongly suspected of having defrauded on the occasion of the “Professional Office” competition, an examination which allows certain officers to be promoted in the body of the commissioners.
The first tests had taken place in January and were to be followed, as of Monday, May 9, by the sessions of the “Grand Oral”, very feared of the candidates. Forty-eight hours later, they were “temporarily” adjourned, without precision as to the following events for all the candidates. The president of the jury, Frédéric Dupuch, 62, is strongly suspected of having favored a police commander, registered in the competition and currently assigned to the legal pole of the cabinet of the Director General of the National Police.
According to information published by Le Figaro, investigators from the General Inspectorate of the National Police (IGPN) seek in particular to support suspicions that appeared on the occasion of telephone listening in a completely different case. These interceptions led them to question the responsibility of Mr. Dupuch in the leak of information relating to the tests of the competition: did the latter took advantage of his function as president of jury to directly help the candidate?
“The track of a pecuniary mobile is not privileged”
The first elements brought to the attention of justice were deemed solid enough for an investigation to be opened from the heads of “fraud to an examination or a competition and complicity of this offense”, Friday, May 6. IGPN investigators are interested in particular in the possible motivations for fraud but, “at this stage of investigations and without presumed their results, the track of a pecuniary mobile is not privileged at the moment”, Ensures a source close to the file, which does not have “knowledge of elements attesting to generalized fraud concerning all candidates”.
Tuesday, May 10, searches were led by the “police police” to the respective homes of the two civil servants and at their workplace, at the DGPN headquarters, rue des Saussaies, in 8 e Paris arrondissement. On this occasion, documents and work computers were seized for analysis.
At the Ministry of the Interior, the affair does not only upset the calendar of this renowned competition. She also poses a problem taking into account the position of Mr. Dupuch, appointed in November 2021 project manager for the creation of the departmental departments of the national police, a vast project to reform the police organization.
Previously, the senior official had successively held posts to the Parisian judicial police, before a detour by the cabinet of Michèle Alliot-Marie, then Minister of the Interior, between 2007 and 2009, under the five-year term of Nicolas Sarkozy. Ephemeral Head of the Central Technical and Scientific Police Service in 2017, he had subsequently taken over the management of the local security of the Parisian agglomeration (DSPAP) of the Paris police headquarters. He had been noted from his duties after the controversies linked to the operations to maintain order following act XVIII of demonstrations of “yellow vests”, on March 16, 2019. In the Champs-Elysées sector, near ‘A hundred businesses had been vandalized or burnt down, without the workforce placed under the orders of Mr. Dupuch managing to intervene effectively.