Diesel: the Senate denounced to justice the pulmonologist paid by Total – The World

This is a first in parliamentary history. The office of the Senate decided, unanimously, Thursday, April 28, to ask the President of the Senate, Gérard Larcher, enter the Parquet “on the action to be impugned statements required under oath” by Professor Michel Aubier, chief the pulmonology department at the Bichat hospital. The pulmonologist is accused of lying under oath before the Senate about his links of interest with the Total group, during his hearing on 16 April 2015, before the commission of inquiry “on the economic and financial costs of air pollution. ” As stated Speaker of the Senate in a statement Thursday morning, “it will be up to the prosecutor to assess whether to prosecute” .

Read also: Pollution: the pulmonologist Michel Aubier face his lies

If the court decides to continue, Professor Aubier risk five years imprisonment and a 75,000 euro fine, according . Penal Code

on 16 April 2015, Michel Aubier had intervened before the senators of the committee as a representative of the Assistance Publique – Hôpitaux de Paris, at the request of its Director General Martin Hirsch. In the preamble to his hearing, the doctor had sworn to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth. “I have no interest related economic actors” , he had then sworn

Read also:. Martin Hirsch: “It necessary that any activity in favor of an industrial or declared “

But nearly a year later, on March 16, Libération and Canard chained showed that the lung was paid since the late 1990s including by Total, the medical officer of functions, from leaders if group health problems.

minimizes hazards of diesel

Frequently asked by the media to speak about the dangers of diesel engines, the doctor has always strived to minimize its effects on health. During the program “Hello doctors,” aired on 1 ^st March 2016 on France 5, he said that air pollution “possibly carcinogenic” , but “for the moment, which has just been shown, it is essentially cancers at relatively high exposures, that is to say, professional.”

It was already more or less the content of his remarks before the Senate Inquiry Committee, where he then failed to mention the respiratory cancers among partially attributable to diseases the atmospheric pollution. But the increased risk of cancer for the general population exposed to fine particles is a fact that is not debated within the scientific and medical community. After five months of work, the Senate inquiry was made on 15 July 2015, its report and estimated the cost in terms of health costs, absenteeism and declining crop yields to 101 3 billion a year.

5000 euros per month Total

After the revelations in the press, Aubier teacher was summoned closed ended March 17 by the Senate committee to explain. The doctor had then recognized touch 5000 euros per month Total oil group.

Relying on Article 6 on the power of committees of inquiry of the order of November 1958 on the functioning of assemblies, senators decided to take over the Senate Office of “the follow-up” to this folder. They got satisfaction with the prosecutor’s seizure decision.

For the environmentalist Senator of Paris, rapporteur of the commission of inquiry, Leila Aichi, this decision of the Senate’s office is a win. “He must be condemned because they can not lie to the national representation at the risk of discrediting the more” , she considers .