In a judgment of October 11, the Court of Cassation dismissed their appeal, emphasizing the sufficient factual basis of Fanny Pigeaud’s investigation.
On Tuesday, October 11, the Court of Cassation rejected the appeal of the French multinational firm and confirmed the decision of the Court of Appeal which had ruled that journalists Edwy Plenel and Fanny Pigeaud had done their work in good faith.
“On April 13, 2016, under the signature of our collaborator Fanny Pigeaud who knows Cameroon very well, Mediapart recounted the fight of two small Cameroonian bosses to have the Bolloré group respect a judgment rendered by local justice in their favor.
The litigation then lasted for 23 years and had led to their ruin, in a context where the Bolloré group, by its omnipresence in the economic activities of the country, imposed its power on the political and judicial authorities of Yaounde”.
Bolloré then seized the court of Nanterre, which severely condemned the media engaged on January 8, 2019, judging the article filled with “bad faith”, and that” as an investigative journalist, “Fanny Pigeaud had to be irreproachable in her investigative work”.
Fanny Pigeaud‘s article had been considered by the Versailles Court of Appeal “of general interest given the multiple activities of the particularly influential Bolloré group in Africa” and treated with “a sufficiently serious factual basis”.
On October 11, the Court of Cassation ruled once again in favour of Mediapart, definitively dismissing Bolloré in this case. The court backed up its judgment in these terms: “the contentious statements are not based solely on unverified statements by third parties but also on a range of documents tending to support these statements, including the unexecuted decision of the Supreme Court and the letter from the International bank for trade and industry in Cameroon, confirming the enforceability of the decision [condemning the Bolloré group to compensate the two Cameroonian bosses”.
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