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French billionaire Vincent Bolloré will stand trial in December before a Paris criminal court on corruption and embezzlement charges tied to election campaigns and port concession deals in Togo and Guinea, prosecutors confirmed Thursday, bringing to a head a case that has wound through the French legal system for more than a decade.
The Parquet National Financier, France's financial crimes prosecutor, said the hearing is scheduled from Dec. 7 to 17, 2026. Bolloré, 73, is charged with corruption of foreign public officials and aiding and abetting breach of trust, linked to presidential campaigns in Togo and Guinea in 2009, 2010 and 2011.
Two co-defendants will face trial alongside him. Gilles Alix, a former board member of Vivendi, and Jean-Philippe Dorent, currently head of Havas International Consulting, are named in the same corruption proceedings.
The core allegation is straightforward in outline, if complex in its business structure. Investigators allege that Havas, the advertising firm then controlled by the Bolloré Group, provided campaign advisory services to the presidential campaigns of Faure Gnassingbé in Togo and Alpha Condé in Guinea at heavily discounted rates. A subsidiary of the Bolloré Group covered roughly 300,000 euros, approximately 75 percent of the total cost, of campaign services for Gnassingbé. In return, prosecutors say, the group was rewarded with the concession to manage the Port of Lomé in Togo and container terminal operations in Conakry, Guinea, strategic logistics assets with substantial long-term commercial value.
Bolloré has consistently denied wrongdoing. His lawyers, Céline Astolfe and Olivier Baratelli, said in a statement that a fair trial is "impossible" and announced they would appeal the judges' order on procedural grounds. They argued that the transactions in question, payments made by cheque and recorded in company accounts, "fell within the normal framework of commercial relations" between the Bolloré and Havas groups, and that Bolloré himself had no knowledge of the arrangements.
The case has been under judicial investigation since 2013. Bolloré was formally placed under investigation in 2018. In 2021, he attempted to end the matter through a negotiated plea in which he and two executives accepted a 375,000 euro fine. A French judge rejected the agreement, finding the facts too serious to resolve without a public trial, and sent the case back to the investigative phase.
The Bolloré Group itself took a separate route. The company signed a convention judiciaire d'intérêt public, a form of deferred prosecution agreement, paying a 12 million euro fine in exchange for the abandonment of corporate-level charges. That settlement covered the company but left individual liability unresolved.
Bolloré's Africa logistics business, which at its peak employed more than 20,000 people across 20 African countries and operated 16 ports alongside warehouses and transport hubs, was sold to MSC Group in 2022. Cyrille Bolloré, the billionaire's youngest son, had taken over Bolloré Africa Logistics in 2019.
The trial comes as the Bolloré family's business interests remain deeply embedded in Africa through other channels. The group's stake in Vivendi, parent company of Canal+, positions it at the centre of African media. Canal+ completed its takeover of South Africa's MultiChoice, the operator behind DStv and GOtv, in 2025. Vivendi also holds a significant stake in Universal Music Group, which has expanded into Africa's music industry through acquisitions including a stake in Nigerian label Mavin Records.
A coalition of NGOs from Togo, Guinea, Ghana, Ivory Coast and Cameroon, operating under the name "Restitution for Africa," has separately filed a civil suit alleging the group unlawfully secured port concessions and demanding that proceeds from the 2022 sale of the Africa logistics business be redistributed to communities in affected countries.
