On 10 November, a Paris court gave four men working for EDF, the French nuclear energy company, fines and prison sentences for a surveillance operation in 2006 that included hacking into Greenpeace France’s computers. EDF itself was fined €1.5m, and ordered to pay €500,000 (£427,770) in damages to Greenpeace.
Pascal Durieux, EDF’s head of nuclear production security in 2006, was jailed for one year (three years with two suspended) and given a €10,000 fine. His deputy, Pierre-Paul François, received a six-month prison sentence (three years with 30 months suspended).
Jail sentences were also handed out to two men at Kargus Consultants, the private detective agency hired to carry out the spying. Thierry Lorho, head of Kargus, received a one-year prison sentence and a €4,000 fine; Alain Quiros, a Kargus computer scientist, received a six-month sentence and a €4,000 fine.
In 2006, Kargus stole 1,400 documents about Greenpeace’s anti-nuclear power campaigning from a computer belonging to Yannick Jadot, then director of Greenpeace France. Greenpeace has fought a long struggle against EDF’s European pressurised reactor (EPR) nuclear power plants at Flamanville (due to open 2014) and Penly (due to start construction in 2012).