The right-wing party had started an exclusion procedure against the mayor of Saint-Etienne on September 13, following the revelations of “Mediapart” on his questioning in a case of political blackmail on his ex-deputy premier.
Le Monde with AFP
The Republican Political Bureau (LR) has sealed his fate. The mayor of Saint-Etienne, Gaël Perdriau, implicated in a “sextape” blackmail scandal, was definitively excluded from the party at a political bureau on Tuesday, October 11, by a vote unanimously.
This decision is not surprising: LR had started an exclusion procedure against the councilor on September 13, Following the Revelations of Mediapart In the political blackmail case to “sextape” in his town. 2>
already removed from his ruling functions at the end of 2021
Former vice-president of the Republicans, Gaël Perdriau had already been dismissed from his responsibilities within the right-wing party in December 2021, after his critical remarks with regard to Valérie Pécresse and Eric Ciotti, candidates for the Congress of the Congress Party for the presidential election.
The case that broke out at the end of August gave his party a reason to try to extricate it from its ranks. In very detailed confessions with an independent media, a former collaborator of the municipality then revealed the underside of a “smear of manners” sponsored, according to him, by the mayor and his entourage to neutralize the ex-centist assistant deputy, Gilles Artigues. According to this relative, the operation was paid through fictitious services billed with two local cultural associations subsidized by the town hall.
A judicial investigation was opened in Lyon after a complaint from Mr. Artigues. The latter denounced the political trap of which he would have been the victim of Mr. Perdriau and his chief of staff after taking a video in January 2015 and the blackmail of which she was the instrument. The video shows this former deputy known for his Catholic commitment and his homophobic positions being massaged by a man in a hotel room in Paris.
indicted in mid-September with two of his relatives, Mr. Perdriau did not stop denying the facts and remained deaf to the calls of those who asked him to put himself on leave of his mandate. However, the scandal pushed him to dismiss his chief of staff, then to put himself on leave of the presidency of the metropolis, while one of his assistants, accused of being the one who turned the compromising video, presented his Resignation.