President Emmanuel Macron confronted with State scandal exposed by BLOOM on national TV

12 June 2025

During the special program “Ocean Emergency” on French TV, President Emmanuel Macron delivered a series of misleading statements, attempting to obscure what has now become a full-fledged State scandal. 

In a desperate crisis communication effort, France’s Ministry of Ecological Transition is attempting to discredit BLOOM and sow doubt by contacting journalists who have spoken about our revelations. 

In response, BLOOM sets the record straight and debunks the President’s main lies. 

The UN Ocean Conference (UNOC), which France aimed to turn into a €60 million greenwashing operation, has instead become a State scandal. It has laid bare the grip of industrial fishing lobby on public institutions — even at the highest levels of the State. 

On France 2, on Tuesday 10 June, during the “Ocean Emergency” special, Emmanuel Macron repeated nearly all the talking points of the industrial fishing lobby, word for word. 

After declaring in the regional press that he would accept “no environmental lectures from anyone,” President Macron proceeded to lie blatantly to journalists, guests, and viewers. 

Under pressure to respond, the government entered into a crisis mode and is now trying to cast doubt on our findings, calling us ‘liars’. 

We are restoring the truth. 

AMPgate: A massive deception around marine protected areas

“What did we do? We consulted our fishers, and where we were at 0.1% strong protection in metropolitan waters, we’ve now reached 4%.” 

On the eve of World Oceans Day and the opening of the UN Ocean Conference, Macron promised “major announcements” and “clearly identified zones” protected from activities such as bottom trawling. 

We had to wait until the press pack produced by the French Ministry for Ecological Transition was circulated on the evening of 8 June to understand, by analysing the attached maps, where the government was planning to label 4% of the waters of mainland France as “strongly protected” by the end of 2026.  

BLOOM exposed this deception just hours later: the areas labelled as “strong protection”, where bottom trawling would be banned, were located… in areas where bottom trawling was already banned.  

These maps show, on the left, the zones announced by the government to be under “strong protection” by 2026 and where trawling would be prohibited, and on the right, this same map but where BLOOM has removed the zones where trawling is already prohibited in France since 2017: almost nothing remains, showing that there is no new zone to be protected by the government.  

Pressed by journalists after a map was published yesterday, the crisis management team of Minister Agnès Pannier-Runacher is now accusing BLOOM of manipulating journalists by refusing to communicate about the Mediterranean: “Why doesn’t BLOOM publish the map for the Mediterranean? Is it because we’re creating new zones there?” indignantly asks the ministry’s communications head, in a complete reversal of roles. BLOOM has not published the Mediterranean map simply because our small team—already working around the clock to fact-check the statements from Emmanuel Macron and Agnès Pannier-Runacher—is unable to replicate the manual work done for the Atlantic coast, given the poor quality of the government’s maps. If the government wants BLOOM to produce accurate maps to identify potential new zones, it must stop withholding information and release the geographical coordinates of the zones proposed for “strong protection”.  

This deception was confirmed by the satisfaction of industrial fishing lobbies, as Serge Larzabal, first Vice President of the National Fisheries Committee, clearly stated: “We are quite satisfied with the government’s announcements. What was announced reflects the work carried out by professionals in zones already closed to bottom trawling.” 

The international and European objective of 30% of genuine marine protected areas free from bottom trawling, destructive fishing techniques, and industrial activities and infrastructure—one third of which should be under “strict protection” without any extractive activity—has completely disappeared from the radar. 

The failure of the French government and the Presidency regarding marine protected areas is total. In stark contrast to this French imposture, the United Kingdom has shown real commitment by announcing a ban on bottom trawling in half of its English MPAs and launching consultations to go further. 

Emmanuel Macron protects industrial fishing by making it invisible

“Our fishing is much less predatory than others. We only have one industrial fishing vessel, the Emeraude. The rest is mostly boats under 12 meters, and the rest are between 12 and 25 meters. These aren’t big boats like that.” 

The denial is staggering. Vessels over 25 meters represent nearly 4% of the French fleet , some of which are reaching more than three times this length, and benefit from public policies designed specifically for them: the opaque and unfair allocation of quotas allows them to land half of the catch, and European public subsidies enable them to capture half the sector’s fuel tax exemptions. 

These French vessels over 25 meters engage in various destructive practices. For example: 

• Bottom trawling: Euronor’s fleet includes five bottom trawlers between 39 and 45 meters. Euronor co-owns the Emeraude (81 m) with the Compagnie des pêches de Saint-Malo; 

• Pelagic trawling: such as the Scombrus (81 m) and the Prins Bernhard (88 m), owned by France Pélagique; 

• Demersal seining: heavily criticized by French fishers, as practiced by vessels like Larche and Tourmalet (34 m), belonging to France Pélagique; 

• Purse seining: particularly by CFTO’s tropical tuna seiners, averaging over 80 meters long. These twenty or so vessels alone catch about 20% of France’s annual catch. 

All companies mentioned above are under Dutch capital ownership, as we revealed in our “Big Five” study. Journalist Charles Villa also investigated this industry’s power in a documentary viewed nearly a million times. The omission of the elephant in the room, the prevalence of destructive Dutch fleets in French waters, reveals the Dutch industrial influence on our government, and incites anger among French fishers. 

“Our problem, I tell you, in our waters, the most industrialized and predatory fishers are not the French ones. Due to the common fisheries policy, you have Irish, Danish, German, Spanish fishers,” said Emmanuel Macron. 

This omission renders invisible a major issue for artisanal fishers in the English Channel, who suffer from this unfair competition at sea. In 2024, investigative journalist Jean-Pierre Canet uncovered the fraud of French MPAs handed over to industrial fishing. BLOOM also conducted field investigations spotlighting factory ships over 100 meters, such as the Zeeland, filmed fishing in the Banc des Flandres, near Dunkirk.  

Emmanuel Macron’s contempt for NGOs

“I’m not an NGO, I take my decisions based on science”. 

The contempt runs deep. 

For the past three years, we have relentlessly repeated one figure: less than 0.1% of France’s metropolitan waters are truly protected. This number comes from a publication by CNRS research director Joachim Claudet. It wasn’t until UNOC that the government finally adopted this figure in its Ministry’s press kit. 

For three years, we’ve been constantly reiterating the recommendations of the IPCC, IPBES, and IUCN, as well as criticisms from top scientific journal Nature in September 2023. BLOOM’s researchers published detailed reports on the fraud of so-called “French-style” protection: France has the most trawled marine protected area in Europe, in the Golfe de Gascogne. In 2024, over 300,000 hours of trawling occurred in our “protected” zones – accounting for 40% of trawling activity in France, in zones meant to be sanctuaries for biodiversity and small-scale fishers. Since January 1, 2025, 43,400 km² of seabed have been destroyed by bottom trawlers in supposedly “protected” French metropolitan waters. 

For years, we have been echoing scientists in the public space—scientists who, a year ago, were warning about the growing “mistrust within our scientific community toward political power,” and who were numerous in choosing not to attend the UNOC conference in Nice so as not to serve as scientific cover for a greenwashing exercise. 

Emmanuel Macron, spokesperson for Ocean Destruction

“There are people who make a living from this fishing. You eat scallops, you eat sole… That’s the reality! Because I listen to my fishers too.” 

The “reality” is actually quite different: no, most French citizens do not regularly eat sole or scallops, as Macron claims, once again showing his disconnect from the French public. The challenge for a social and ecological transition of French fishing lies elsewhere. 

Above all, it lies in the representation of small-scale fishers in governance and consultations with the government. Because “my fishers,” for Emmanuel Macron, are representatives of industrial fishing—a handful of powerful shipowners occupying leadership positions in institutions, betraying the 74% of the French fleet composed of small-scale fishers. 

Charles Braine, a small-scale fisher from Britanny warned at the end of the TV program about the President’s “condescension” and the public institutions’ contempt for the majority of the profession: 

“There are no “fishermen”, we are diverse and sometimes with divergent interests, philosophies, points of view. He [President Macron] has chosen his camp, that of the majority lobby that defends those who have had rights and quotas for ages and who are the worst in terms of jobs, value per kilo and very often environmental impact. They are the rentiers of French fishing, many of whom are responsible for the state of stocks and the decline in the fleet“. 

Small-scale fishers are indeed the great forgotten of France’s public policy, forced to call for help in the press calling for MPAs that shield them from trawlers ravaging marine ecosystems and leaving a desert in their wake. Ahead of UNOC, they once again took to the European press to stress the urgency of creating real MPAs. 

That is the meaning of the work we are doing with scientists to “change course” and “free ourselves from trawling,” by building a real social and ecological transition policy for the sector. 

Rather than defending the interests of ocean destroyers, the government must answer for the State scandal revealed by BLOOM, and finally offer a vision for the future of the ocean and fishing—one based on immediate ecosystem protection and a progressive transition away from destructive fishing methods, all while ensuring social justice for the sector.