EDF men jailed following Greenpeace spying trial

This afternoon (November 10) judge Isabelle Prévost-Desprez, ruling in the case near Paris in France, sentenced two EDF employees and a third man to prison.

Mrs Prévost-Desprez also fined, the French state-owned business, 1.5m euros and ordered it to pay half a million euros in damages to Greenpeace.

During the trial the court heard EDF had been hacking into the hard drives of Greenpeace computers and had placed a ‘Trojan Horse’ in the hard drive of one, so it could access private emails and documents being written by Greenpeace.

As a result EDF executive Pierre-Paul François was sentenced to three years imprisonment, with 30 months suspended and another employee, Pascal Durieux, received the same sentence, with two years suspended and a 10,000 euro fine for commissioning the spying operation.

The judge also handed down a guilty verdict in the case of Thierry Lorho, the head of Kargus, a company employed by EDF to hack into the computers of Greenpeace.

Lorho was sentenced to three years in jail with a further two years suspended as well as a 4,000 euro fine.

Outside the court Greenpeace’s executive director for France, Adelaide Colin, said: “The fine and damages awarded to Greenpeace send a strong message to the nuclear industry that no one is above the law.

“This case should send a signal to any country considering building reactors with EDF that the company can’t be trusted.

“Instead of working with the nuclear industry, countries should invest in clean, safe sources of renewable electricity.”

EDF’s UK press office declined to comment on the verdict while no one was immediately

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available at its French counterpart.

Luke Walsh