Ministers to be heard in front of upper house of the French Parliament at 5pm today - Gérald Darmanin, Minister of the Interior, and Amélie Oudéa-Castéra, Minister of Sports, will explain themselves to the upper house of the French Parliament, this Wednesday from 5 p.m., following the incidents at the Stade de France ahead of the Champions League final on Saturday.
Four days after the chaos around the Stade de France, the Ministers will be heard jointly for two hours by the Law and Culture Commissions during a session open to the press and broadcast on the parliament website.
With the approach of the parliamentary elections (June 12 and 19), the affair took a highly political turn, in particular on France's ability to organize major sporting events one year from the 2023 Rugby World Cup and two years from the Olympic Games. in Paris.
Liverpool club president Tom Werner expressed his indignation in a letter to Amélie Oudéa-Castéra, after his remarks and those of Gérald Darmanin, who have been repeating since Saturday evening that British supporters are largely responsible for the incidents, with a "massive, industrial and organized fraud of counterfeit tickets".
These charges bring back to Liverpool supporters the horrible memories of the Hillsborough disaster which left 97 dead in 1989 in a mob for which Reds fans had long been held responsible before the bad decisions of the police are not recognised. "Your comments are irresponsible, unprofessional and totally disrespectful," Tom Werner wrote in his letter, a copy of which was obtained by the Liverpool Echo daily.
On Tuesday, the Minister of Sports did however say "we have Liverpool supporters who were completely in good standing, whose evening was either ruined or some were unable to attend the game, and we clearly owe them an apology". However, the figures put forward by the French government remain highly criticized, in England as in France.
