Fake Allegations About Algerian Retirees Defrauding French Pensions

After a lot of artificial noise and fake news, the French National Old-Age Insurance Fund (CNAV) came out to refute the lies that have been circulated recently, according to which there is deception by thousands of Algerian retirees or their families, by obtaining pensions in violation of the law, for example in case of death of the retiree.

The French newspaper “L’Opinion” delved into what it called “the great fraud” in French pensions by Algerian retirees, and concluded that it was just a “myth” after it was able to come up with figures issued by the French Pension Fund, which “categorically deny the size of this phenomenon”.

Former Minister of Public Accounts in France, Gabriel Attal, who was later assigned by French President Emmanuel Macron to lead the government, said in an interview with Le Parisien newspaper last May that his country was moving to establish a broad plan to control fake beneficiaries of social aid.

The French official claimed at the time that more than a million retirees are receiving their pensions outside France, half of them outside the European Union and more than half of these (300,000) in Algeria alone. He accused the Algerian families of not announcing the death of their relative who retired from France to continue receiving the pension without having any right, but the investigation conducted by the French newspaper revealed the falsity of those statements.

In this regard, the French National Old-Age Insurance Fund (CNAV) assigned two people at the French Consulate in Algeria to conduct an audit of the files that would lead to the discovery of the alleged fraudulent operations, according to L’Opinion, then the Fund reached the conclusion based on the numbers revealed by its director, Renaud Villard, who confirmed the inauthenticity of what was being marketed.

Regarding the figures reached by the Fund, there are only less than a thousand elderly Algerians who received a pension from the French Pension Fund, and not “hundreds of thousands,” out of a total of about 340,000 Algerian retirees, according to official French statistics.

The survey focused on 2,000 retired people over 95 who received invitations to go to banks to confirm their identities. However, only 370 people responded to prove that they were still alive. Renaud Villard, the French fund CNAV General Manager, explained that their pensions had been suspended. He asserted that his services will now focus on Algerian retirees over the age of 90, whose number is 31,000 people.

The French official did not rule out the hypothesis of the death of those who did not respond to the summons to go to the French consulate in Algeria without informing the Fund, due to the failure to exchange civil status data between the two countries and also due to the possibility of issuing forged documents. Accordingly, his services decided to conduct an examination every four years to ensure these people were still alive.

According to the same source, starting next June, the French Fund CNAV will introduce a new investigation tool, which is the use of a smartphone camera, to verify whether the image matches the biometric ID card that is used by the retiree, in a simple, easy and effective procedure, as is done in airports.

Such allegations are usually driven by French politicians belonging to the right and the French extreme right, which is the political family that has taken hostility to everything Algerian as part of its political project, as happened in the immigration file and its desperation to overthrow the 1968 agreement.