The Paris prosecutor’s office has closed an investigation launched into the activities of Swiss agency ALP Services following complaints by French website Mediapart and anti-racism activist Rokhaya Diallo, sources related to the case confirmed on Friday.
The agency had been accused of spying on various European public figures for the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
French news agency AFP reports that the complainants included Islamic scholar Tariq Ramadan and Zakia Khattabi, Belgium’s Climate and Environment Minister.
The prosecutor’s office confirmed that the case was “closed without action” on 12 April after the BRDP, responsible for cracking down on personal crime, “unsuccessfully attempted multiple times” to make contact with Mario Brero [a close associate of ALP Services] and his Geneva-based company, and “unsuccessfully sought additional information” from the leadership of Mediapart.
Given the challenges of conducting further local investigations, the Paris prosecutor’s office has officially reported the matter to Switzerland, which could potentially pursue the issue domestically, the Public Prosecutor’s Office stated.
According to a source close to the case, Switzerland’s public prosecutor has been investigating Brero and ALP Services since December.
Emmanuel Tordjman, lawyer for Mediapart, expressed his “astonishment to learn of this closure” from the press and his “shock, as we have not been served any requests for documents or hearing since the complaint was lodged in January” by Mediapart and one of its journalists.
Vincent Brengarth, Rokhaya Diallo's lawyer, who filed a complaint in August, on Friday expressed his “distress over the inadequacy of the investigations" in such a sensitive case. "It compounds the justice system’s delay in dealing with profiling and clandestine operations,” he said.
In 2023, Mediapart and the European Investigative Collaborations (EIC) consortium had accused Mario Brero and ALP Services of working on behalf of UAE intelligence. Between 2017 and 2020, they had allegedly profiled the names of 1,000 Europeans and more than 400 organisations supposedly linked to the Muslim Brotherhood across 18 European countries, including over 200 individuals and 120 organisations in France.
A preliminary investigation was launched in France at the end of 2023, after another complaint filed by Sihem Souid, one of the main lobbyists for Qatar in France.
Mario Brero’s lawyer did not immediately respond to an AFP request for comment.
