On April 16, 2015, Michel Aubier, pulmonologist and medical consultant at Total, had denied any link with the oil group in front of a Senate committee which received him to talk about the economic and financial cost of air pollution. A year later, he revealed to the same commission that he had received 50,000 to 60,000 euros per year since 1997. However, a World article also accuses him of having been paid more than 150,000 euros per year in 2013 and 2014 by the Total group. Far from the 50,000 to 60,000 euros declared by the pulmonologist. This revelation, like that of having killed his membership in the oil group, earned him today, Wednesday June 14, 2017, being tried for “false testimony under oath” at the Tribunal de Grande Instance in Paris.
A lawyer determined to prove his client’s innocence
His lawyer, François Saint-Pierre will plead the acquittal. According to him “there was no conflict of interest between his intervention in the Senate and his duties as occupational physician at Total, he was not involved in industrial production”. A priority question of constitutionality (QPC) will also be filed by Michel Aubier’s lawyer who believes that his client has “never been a diesel propagandist”. He does not consider the Senate committee to be a jurisdiction, and contests the qualification of “false testimony”.
In this case, the Senate became a civil party as well as the two NGOs Future Generations and Ecology Without Borders who demand “exemplary sentences” and wish “this trial to be the beginning of an awareness of the misdeeds of conflicts of ‘interests in the field of health’. The 69-year-old pulmonologist, now retired, faces up to five years in prison and a fine of 75,000 euros.
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