The campaign for the presidential elections has shown how much the French expect exemplary elected representatives as a priority, especially in a period of purchasing power difficulties. The issues of sponsorship, transparency and unjustified advantages have illustrated this. A particular area illustrates this expectation well everywhere in France.
The hidden godfathers of wind turbines.
Few people know it, but every wind operation begins in secret years earlier with compromises signed in secret between landowners and a wind developer.. The interests are enormous. Each compromise weighs tens of thousands of euros per year in strictly personal income. These discreet agreements are the essential basis of the operation. No study starts without this precious sesame. The studies last several years during which nothing will be known of these arrangements. These compromises are not subject to any control, no prior publicity. And yet, they decide the future of thousands of homes that ignore it. We can talk about business between insiders.
It becomes necessary to publish by legal announcement, in each municipality and as soon as they are signed, the hidden promises to lease land to a wind project with the amount of the rent collected. These operations are public and benefit from very significant tax advantages. Check-in procedures allow this. Why does it have to be done in each municipality in France as for any other public project?
Beneficial owners are only vaguely known at the very last moment. Paradoxically, this process does not protect them either, since they are very poorly informed of the final project and too late too. Several parliamentary questions have shown the weaknesses in the protection of individuals canvassed at home. A single example suffices to show this: for ten years, the owners were unaware that they would inherit huge concrete bases permanently in their land and uncovered at the time of construction. The cost of removal will be higher than the total rent collected from the first failure.
An occult and unjust system, favorable to corruption
During the votes of the municipal councils, no declaration of assets is required of the elected officials. Over the past ten years, a number of legal actions have revealed multiple illegal interests. Thanks to confidential compromises, local elected officials have instructed or even attracted projects concerning their own land, or that belonging to their family. These projects subsequently allowed them to derive substantial income.
But there is an even bigger problem. Many rentier owners, heirs to land, no longer live there after leaving the rural world. They are canvassed in town by financial intermediaries who encourage them to “make profitable” abandoned rural land in favor of wind developers. In this case, it is impossible for the inhabitants of a municipality to know that a serious threat hovers over them. Their fate depends on the goodwill of an unknown banker or wealth manager located at the other end of France. Their personal projects are hanging by a thread that can let go of them at any time years later, because it remains hidden for a long time. Hundreds of farms, hotel or tourist facilities, homes, craft businesses, are affected without knowing it, and without being able to make their arrangements. They will not be compensated.
Pre-publication of land rentals for wind turbines is now discontinuedbut unavoidable, if you want avoid serious social unrest and local clashes.
On a moral and civic level, these practices are shocking. Thanks to secrecy, distant city dwellers, who do not live there, will benefit from comfortable incomes by authorizing the authorization in the middle of the countryside of machines which will pollute the lives of hundreds of households. Other inhabitants will direct towards their neighbors nuisances that they do not want at home, but they will benefit from it. The income they will receive will not benefit the local environment at all. They will be rewarded for giving up their possessions. This return to feudalism from another age and to serfdom is no longer acceptable in the 21st century, when 15 million French people are now in poverty or precariousness, mainly where wind turbines are installed.
www.economiematin.fr
