Summary: The EPO scandal has officially spilled over to France, where a French Senator got involved and starts asking serious questions

ONE of our sources for the EPO stories handed to us this letter in French. If any of our French-speaking readers could kindly provide us with an English translation, that would greatly help raise awareness.

Our source says that our dozens of articles "may even be causing some ripples in the outside world. According to our information, the French Senator Jean-Yves Leconte wrote a letter to the French Ministry in charge of the INPI on 14 October.

"He doesn't mention the Topić affair, but he refers to the INPI-cronyism in a lot of senior EPO appointments and he requests that the Minister exercise more control over France's delegate to the AC (the current Director of the INPI and Battistelli's successor in that position)." ⬆

Update: We now have a translation of the letter into English. It states:

Mr Minister,

I hereby confirm that I have read your letter dated September 15th 2014 relating to the social climate currently prevailing within the European Patent Office (EPO). I note as well that you support the idea of setting up a social audit within the Office and that you have notified this to our representative in the Administrative council.

Nevertheless, you certainly know that both the President Mr. Benoit Battistelli and our representative in the Administrative Council (AC), Mr. Yves Lapierre, come from the French National Institue of Industrial Property (INPI), and that one of the topics which make the atmosphere extremely tense at EPO is that former members of INPI are taking over the direction of this organism in a disproportionate manner.

For this reason, it seems legitimate that, regarding the mandate exercised by Mr Lapierre for the INPI, the former should effectively and regularly be framed by instructions issued by your services, notably in order to spare us situations where we would end up at odds with the management of his President, being noted that certain members of the AC insistently refer to his French citizenship.