On 7 July 2026, shortly after half past one in the afternoon, the Paris court of appeal reduced Marine Le Pen’s ban from public office to forty five months, thirty of them suspended, already served since her first conviction. That same evening, on TF1, Le Pen announced she would appeal to the Court of Cassation while remaining a candidate for the 2027 presidential election. Eleven days earlier, on the other side of the Atlantic, the investigative unit of Noticias Caracol revealed recordings implicating two former senior officials of Gustavo Petro’s government in negotiations with the Clan del Golfo. Within a week, that journalistic leak turned into three parallel institutional investigations and a referral to international criminal justice. Two events, two countries, the same kind of capital behind the screen.
The capital that absolves
Vincent Bolloré did not start in media. He started in cigarette paper and African port logistics, and only entered communications in 2004, when he bought the Havas agency. From there he built a shareholding position inside Vivendi, the parent company that controlled Canal+, until he became its largest shareholder. In December 2024, Vivendi split into three publicly listed entities, Canal+, Havas and Louis Hachette Group. As of 31 December 2025, the Bolloré group still held 30.4% of the capital and voting rights across all three. That figure is not symbolic, it is what lets him appoint executives, impose editorial lines and survive legal attempts to force a buyout of minority shareholders, as the Paris court of appeal confirmed just six days before the Le Pen verdict.
CNews, Europe 1, the Journal du Dimanche, Paris Match, the publishing houses Fayard, Hatier and Grasset, the Relay retail chain in stations and airports, all of it answers, directly or indirectly, to the same shareholder. Add to that Havas, the advertising group that gave Bolloré his first foothold in communications in 2004, and a stake in Banijay, the production company that turns over 4.8 billion euros a year making mass entertainment programming for French public television, a detail that shows how tightly editorial influence and the entertainment business end up intertwined under the same shareholder roof. The 2023 absorption of the Lagardère group, publisher of Paris Match and owner of Europe 1, only widened that same footprint further into radio and weekly news magazines. Reporters Without Borders ranked France twenty fifth worldwide in its 2026 press freedom index and explicitly named the Bolloré group’s expansion as a factor in declining pluralism, citing methods described as brutal and interventionist and the absence of internal counterweights in its newsrooms.
As of 31 December 2025, the Bolloré group held 30.4% of the capital and voting rights of Canal+, Havas and Louis Hachette Group, according to the French financial press following the Vivendi split.
What that percentage buys is not the truth of a judicial verdict, no one seriously claims the court of appeal took instructions. What it buys is the speed and the framing of the public reaction that follows the verdict. When the first conviction in March 2025 banned Le Pen from office for five years, Jordan Bardella called for demonstrations straight from the microphones of Europe 1 and the cameras of CNews, outlets belonging to his own shareholder camp, turning a judicial defeat into street mobilisation within hours. When the appeal reopened her path to candidacy, the same media architecture stood ready to narrate the outcome as vindication.
The capital that concentrates
Colombia does not have one Bolloré. It has three. Luis Carlos Sarmiento Angulo built his fortune, estimated by Forbes at more than eleven billion dollars, in banking through Grupo Aval, before buying El Tiempo outright in 2012, the country’s highest circulation daily, along with City TV. The Santo Domingo family, grouped today under Valorem, comes from beer and soft drinks, and controls Caracol Televisión and Blu Radio. Grupo Ardila Lülle, also of soft drink origin, owns RCN Televisión and more than a hundred radio stations. Between the three, along with the more recent addition of Grupo Gilinski in Semana and El Heraldo, they concentrate more than ninety percent of national audience across television, print and radio.
The origin of each fortune matters because it explains its subsequent behaviour. Sarmiento Angulo built Grupo Aval on four banks, Bogotá, Occidente, Popular and AV Villas, before diversifying into infrastructure, energy and construction, and only then, with the bank as its base, acquired El Tiempo outright in 2012 for over a billion dollars. Carlos Ardila Lülle started from Postobón, the soft drink bottler founded by his father in law, and used it as a financial platform to build both RCN Radio and RCN Televisión in the 1980s. The Gilinski family, the most recent addition to Colombia’s media map through the purchase of Semana, El Heraldo and El País de Cali, likewise comes from investment banking. No Colombian capital of any weight in media was born in a newsroom, and none of the three has ever needed to be.
The logic is identical to the French case though older in its origin, the media outlet was never the first business, it was added once the fortune had already been made elsewhere, in banking, brewing, bottling. That genealogy explains each outlet’s editorial line better than any stated principle of journalism, because it always protects, ultimately, the interests of the sector where the capital was born.
When absolving is the function
On the seventh of July, TF1 gave Le Pen the airtime to announce live that she remained in the race. That was an editorial choice, not a legal obligation. The channel chose to frame the outcome as political continuity rather than judicial scandal. The conviction stands, the electronic tag stands, but the public function of the judicial fact was converted into campaign legitimacy before the day was even over.
An Ifop Fiducial poll released weeks before the ruling placed Le Pen at 32% of first round voting intention, against a range of 35% to 37% for Jordan Bardella, her own protégé within the party. The appeal did not return her to a marginal race, it returned her to the centre of a bloc that already led the general polls for 2027. No criminal conviction, neither the first nor the second, actually managed to displace her from the board, and the same outlets that framed her return as vindication have spent months treating those numbers as a settled fact rather than an open question.
When exposing is the function
On the twenty fifth of June 2026, Noticias Caracol broadcast a recording from the second of September 2022, just days after the presidential inauguration, in which Danilo Rueda, then high commissioner for peace, was heard discussing with a Clan del Golfo commander the suspension of bombing raids and a freeze on extraditions in exchange for opening negotiations. The former defence minister, Iván Velásquez, was also named in the file. The institutional response was immediate and cascading, within days rather than months. The Fiscalía opened an investigation against Rueda, Velásquez and former intelligence director Jorge Lemus. The Procuraduría opened a preliminary inquiry against four former officials. Congress’s Comisión de Acusaciones announced it would investigate President Petro himself over the alleged deal. And the material was referred to be incorporated into a complaint already filed at the International Criminal Court.
Under the Petro government, according to figures compiled by La Silla Vacía, the Clan del Golfo grew from four thousand to nearly ten thousand members and expanded its presence from two hundred to two hundred and ninety two municipalities.
The Clan del Golfo cascade was not an isolated episode. Months earlier, two of the nine magistrates on the Consejo Nacional Electoral had formally requested an investigation into alleged irregular financing of Petro’s 2022 presidential campaign, as well as into Ricardo Roa, then campaign manager and now head of Ecopetrol. The story was first reported by El Tiempo, Sarmiento Angulo’s paper, before the case could escalate toward the impeachment commission of the House of Representatives. Petro called the episode a constitutional rupture. Whatever the legal merit of each case taken separately, the pattern repeats, the primary source of public exposure is consistently one of the same three or four conglomerates, never an outlet outside that ownership structure.
The contrast with the French case does not lie in the guilt of one side and the innocence of the other, that is not for this text to establish. It lies in the speed and the direction of the machinery. In France, capital’s media apparatus absorbed a ruling unfavourable to the radical right and converted it into campaign momentum within hours. In Colombia, the same class of machinery, with Noticias Caracol at the tip of the spear, converted a journalistic leak into a full institutional siege against a left wing government in under a week, escalating it all the way to an international criminal tribunal. Just as telling as the cascade itself was the inverse episode that never happened, in November 2025 a fabricated post circulated on social media claiming the Fiscalía had opened an investigation into Caracol over the Calarcá case, and La Silla Vacía’s Detector de Mentiras had to explicitly debunk it, proof that the usual direction of the judicial flow is so predictable that its reverse strikes people as implausible on its face.
The same architecture, two opposite functions
There is no need to imagine an explicit conspiracy to explain the coincidence. It is enough to observe who owns what and who structurally benefits from each of the two outcomes. Colombian banking, brewing and bottling capital has an objective interest in the fragility of a government that has tried to touch tax reform, labour reform and land ownership. French logistics and publishing capital has an objective interest in consolidating a right that threatens none of its established positions. Valorem does not need to instruct Noticias Caracol on which recording to broadcast, Sarmiento Angulo does not need to call a prosecutor in Bogotá for El Tiempo to amplify the cascade, editorial selection of what gets aired and what gets followed closely already does that work for them, every day, without anyone having to sign an order.
The asymmetry in timing confirms the asymmetry in function. Absolving takes one evening, one channel, one television studio. Besieging takes a week but mobilises four separate bodies, police, disciplinary, parliamentary and international, precisely because exposing requires sustaining pressure on several fronts at once, while rescuing needs only a single well timed narrative gesture. That imbalance in the institutional effort required is no accident, it reflects how different it is to defend power already held from trying to dislodge power that threatens it.
What both countries call press freedom is, too often, the freedom of a handful of fortunes to decide which judicial fact deserves to become a national story and which deserves to dissolve into noise. Neither Paris nor Bogotá needed to break a single written law to arrange that outcome. The difference between absolving and exposing does not depend on the law, it depends on who owns the camera doing the filming…
G.S.
Sources
- Vincent Bolloré, l’héritier breton devenu le capitaliste le plus puissant de France
- Vincent Bolloré, plongée dans un empire qui bouscule la liberté de la presse en France
- Quand un seul actionnaire pèse sur l’info, le pluralisme vacille
- Peine réduite en appel pour Marine Le Pen, condamnée à 15 mois ferme d’inéligibilité
- En direct, condamnée en appel, Marine Le Pen pourrait se présenter
- French appeals court will issue ruling in National Rally case, Bardella calls for CNews/Europe 1 protest
- Financiación del periodismo en Colombia
- ¿Quiénes son los dueños de los medios de comunicación en Colombia?
- Gustavo Petro será investigado en la Comisión de Acusaciones del Congreso
- Audios y pruebas sobre presuntos acuerdos serán llevados a la Corte Penal Internacional
- Procuraduría abre indagación contra exfuncionarios del Gobierno Petro
- Duerma informado con las claves de este 3 de julio de 2026
- Detector, Fiscalía no anunció investigación contra Caracol por caso Calarcá
- Fiscalía indagará denuncias que salpican a Danilo Rueda e Iván Velásquez
- Colombia election authority magistrates call for probe into Petro’s 2022 campaign
