Manuel Valls boarded Gulf Air flight GF18, which left Paris's Charles de Gaulle Airport (CDG) at 11:17 am on 22 July, and landed in Bahrain's capital, Manama, early evening. There until 24 July and for a fee of €30,000, the former French president François Hollande's Socialist prime minister will be part of a delegation expected by the Bahraini Foreign Minister, Abdullatif bin Rashid Al Zayani, to discuss the consequences of the opening of a preliminary investigation by France's National Financial Prosecutor's Office (PNF) into the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruling of 16 March 2001 on the demarcation of maritime borders between Qatar and Bahrain.
Accompanying the former PM, who set up his own consulting firm Binidali Conseil MV in July 2021, will be Christian Charrière-Bournazel, a lawyer and former president of the Paris Bar Association, and Arnaud Lacheret, a political science professor at France's SKEMA Business School who previously worked at the Arabian Gulf University in Bahrain's capital, Manama. All were asked to come by Philippe Feitussi, one of the partners in the Paris office of the British law firm DWF, who is organising the trip. As revealed by French newspaper Libération in February 2023, Feitussi represents the MP Philippe Latombe from the centrist political party MoDem, who was behind the allegations made to the PNF under Article 40 of the Criminal Procedure Code concerning the long-running dispute between Bahrain's Al Khalifa family and Qatar's Al Thani family.
Article 40 states that "any established authority, public officer or civil servant who, in the performance of his duties, acquires knowledge of a crime or offence is required to notify the public prosecutor without delay and to forward to that magistrate all information, reports and acts relating thereto".
Delegation of experts dispatched
In a letter sent to Al Zayani on 12 April, Feitussi informed the Bahraini foreign minister that the PNF had decided to open a preliminary investigation into the reports made by Latombe and that he had held a meeting with the relevant prosecutor. Then, on 18 April, Al Zayani invited the lawyer to visit the kingdom "with a delegation of experts" to discuss the matter.
Contacted by Intelligence Online, Feitussi explained that he set up "a technical delegation with lawyers and magistrates, because they [Bahrain] want to know what is happening there [in France]". As for the presence of Valls, the lawyer said that it was part of a "geopolitical process of reflection," but also had a "political dimension".
Latombe, who was re-elected as an MP on 7 July in the first constituency of Vendée, north west France, will take part in the discussions by video call. The same goes for Céline Clément-Petremann, a consultant director at communications firm Vae Solis, who knows the PNF very well. She was previously its communications director, from 2017 to 2020. Contacted by Intelligence Online, Clément-Petremann confirmed that she had been recruited for this project due to her PNF experience.
The cost of the trip comes to €100,212, paid for by the client, Bahrain's ministry of foreign affairs, according to documents made available to us. Intelligence Online understands that the payment to DWF may have been made via a discreet Hong Kong-based investment fund, Queen Capital International Ltd.
‘Designed to sway certain judges in Qatar's favour'
In the report under Article 40 made to the PNF Public Prosecutor Jean-François Bohnert, which Intelligence Online has seen, the MP stated that in the context of the dispute between Bahrain and Qatar at the ICJ between 1994 and 2011 concerning the demarcation of their maritime borders, "the evidence brought to [his] attention suggests that these decisions may be the result of behaviour that can be classified as corruption and influence peddling designed to sway certain judges in Qatar's favour".
In its judgment of 16 March 2001, the ICJ ruled that Qatar had sovereignty over the Zubarah region and the Jinan Islands. The Hawar Islands, however, fell under the sovereignty of Bahrain. In addition, this decision, which is still souring Qatari-Bahraini relations (IO, 02/12/22, 04/03/22), gave Doha full control over the huge North Field West offshore gas field, which Bahrain is largely excluded from.
To justify his 2022 and 2023 reports, more than 20 years after the decision was taken, Latombe points out, among other things, that the purchase of property by former Algerian foreign minister Mohamed Bedjaoui, who was the ex-president of the ICJ in charge of the case from 1994 to 1997, and Ali bin Fetais Al Marri, one of Qatar's lawyers on the case, as well as the French consultant Jean-Paul Soulié, well known to Intelligence Online readers (IO, 23/11/16, 22/01/14) "did not correspond to their financial resources". On this point, Feitussi, who organised the trip, tells us that he "does not know who the source of the corruption is," but that there were "suspicious discrepancies".
According to Clément-Petremann, the idea is not to "go back on the 2001 decision" but to investigate "potential money laundering". Feitussi echoed this view, saying that it was "important that something be done to show that the institution [the ICJ] may have been involved in corruption".
Contacted by Intelligence Online, Charrière-Bournazel and Lacheret did not answer our questions, nor did Bahrain's Communication and Media Directorate.
