The Ministry of Economy and Finance admits today: there has been no monitoring of the €211 billion of public money paid unconditionally and without compensation each year to companies. There has been no control, no monitoring of results, no traceability of the use of these astronomical sums. It is one of the greatest state scandals!

The French have reason to be angry!

Patrick CHAMPAGNAC

Why did we let this happen? Why was no countervailing power able to stop this infernal machine? How did we get to this point? These questions must be answered. They must be asked. They concern all French people, those who have been accused by the Prime Minister of being responsible for France's abysmal deficit and the economic crisis, accused of having lived beyond their means by a political class that has never worked in real life but has lived for decades beneath the gilded ceilings of the Republic. The French want to know what their tax money has been used for. These questions must be asked because they concern the public interest. Yet these questions have only recently arisen. Why? For what reasons?

At no point under Emmanuel Macron's presidency have successive governments seen fit to rectify the situation. On the contrary, all turned a blind eye, all played the distraction, even joining forces with employers and certain media outlets to create smokescreens around this state scandal by always pointing to the same scapegoats: retirees, immigrants, the unemployed, those receiving social security benefits, the precarious, social security fraudsters, the "nobodies," all singled out for media scrutiny, accused of increasing the public deficit, women and men who must be denounced, hunted down, every day, relentlessly, monitored and punished... What an outrage!

Of the €211 billion in unconditional public aid paid to businesses each year, the government has never audited a single company to determine where this public money went, what it was used for, or whether it was used to create jobs.

However, everyone has seen that wages have not increased and that staff and jobs have melted away like snow in the sun. This colossal public aid has not prevented these companies from laying off employees, relocating, or selling some of their production to foreign capital.

The example of Sanofi is revealing. The CAC40-listed group received enormous public aid from the state in research credit, and this has not stopped it from cutting jobs: 3,000 in France between 2019 and 2023, and as many before then, and 1,200 in 2024 in Research and Development. In April 2025, Sanofi wanted to cut another 385 jobs in France, but this latest redundancy plan was overturned by a court order from the Administrative Court. Yet Sanofi is doing very well. In the third quarter of 2020, it announced revenue of €9.48 billion, up 5.7%, and net income growing by 9.4%. The full-year results were expected to follow this trend, as in subsequent years, each time justifying new record dividends for shareholders. In 2024, Le Canard enchaîné noted the group's €5.4 billion in profits in 2023, and noted that the new Minister of the Economy has called for "a comprehensive review" of the public subsidies the Sanofi group has received over the past ten years, "particularly the €250 million paid to develop a French vaccine against Covid that never saw the light of day."

Sanofi is one example, but how many other large CAC 40 companies have benefited from the system? TotalEnergie, LVMH, Auchan, which announced on November 5, 2024 its intention to separate from 2,384 of its 54,000 employees in France after having benefited between 2013 and 2023 from 636 million euros in tax aid and 1.3 billion euros in social security contribution reductions, Carrefour, which benefited from 2.3 billion euros in exemptions under the CICE (Competitive Employment Tax Credit) and which paid out 2.8 billion to its shareholders, Michelin, which in November 2024 announced 1,525 job cuts after having received 70 million euros in public aid in two years and which at the same time paid 1.4 million euros in dividends to its shareholders, ArcelorMittal, which, after having received nearly 300 million euros from the State in 2023, plans to cut 600 jobs while distributing each year to its shareholders between €200 and €300 million in dividends, Lactalis, StMicroelectronics, which plans to cut 1,000 jobs after receiving €487 million in public aid in 2023, while returning more than €200 million to its shareholders, etc.
(Figures taken from the report of the Senate Commission of Inquiry into the use of public aid to large companies, submitted on July 7, 2025)

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