The water war between Suez and elected officials in the Ile-de-France region intensifies, as the French media Reporterre reports.
The mayors of the Paris region are fighting to regain control of their water. Attac has unearthed an archive that could prove damaging to the multinational Suez, which has been accused of overcharging for drinking water for decades.
An intense political and legal battle is underway between Suez and four Île-de-France inter-municipalities over the sensitive issue of drinking water production.
The multinational is accused of having abused its dominant position for a long time to charge obscene prices at the expense of the 1.4 million inhabitants of the region. So far, elected representatives have been unable to introduce competition or bring the production of drinking water under public control. In fact, Suez claims that it owns the drinking water production plants it built in the 1960s [1] and the 600 kilometres of pipes that run through four départements in the Île-de-France region. This is an atypical situation that is being fiercely contested by elected representatives and citizens’ associations.
The price of water should be equal to the ‘cost price’.
While researching the archives of the Essonne département, a group of Attac members discovered documents which, in their opinion, change the situation. They found a prefectoral decree from March 1967 which states that the price of water, a highly sensitive issue and the cornerstone of the affair, must be ‘equal to the cost price and subject to the approval of the Prefect of Essonne’ for communes outside the new town of Evry. Today, the authorities do not ensure that this rule is respected,’ says Jean-Pierre Gaillet of Attac.
They also found a 1967 prefectoral decree declaring one of the plants built by Lyonnaise des Eaux, the forerunner of Suez, to be in the “public interest” on land it owned. Philippe Rio, the communist mayor of Grigny, has seized on this information to launch an open attack: ‘This information strengthens our conviction,’ he tells Reporterre. We’re going to continue the political battle and quickly look into the possibility of legal proceedings to demand the factory’s return as property. There is a grey area that has benefited Suez for a long time. The courts must play their role as peacekeepers.
To settle this debate, in March 2024 the elected representatives asked Suez to provide them with a title deed to the plant. Their letter remained unanswered. When contacted by Reporterre, the Suez group simply stated that it had “made a financial proposal for the sale of the assets and is awaiting the decision of the local authorities”.
An unprecedented dispute
The dispute began in the 2010s, largely as a result of public pressure for water to be returned to public ownership. On their bills, residents pay between €0.93 and €1.12 per cubic metre of water, while elected representatives and citizens, with expert advice at hand, estimate the cost of water leaving the plant at €0.50 per cubic metre.
In response to this anger, four major intercommunal bodies (Grand-Paris-Sud, Cœur d’Essonne, Val d’Yerres Val-de-Seine and Grand-Orly-Seine-Bièvres) have decided to join forces in early 2023 to form the Syndicat mixte eau du sud francilien (SESF). The first objective is to renegotiate with Suez the recovery of the plants and pipelines.
After months of negotiations, the multinational made an offer in September 2024. It offered to buy the plants from the local authorities for 240 million euros. This is despite the fact that the plants are “already paid for and written off through our water bills”, according to three associations working on the issue, Coordination eau Île-de-France, Eau publique Orge Essonne and Aggl’eau Paris-Saclay.
As part of the ongoing legal dispute, the local authorities decided to pay Suez only €0.50 per cubic metre from 2023. This decision was challenged by Suez before the Administrative Court of Versailles. According to our information, the judges have just confirmed the mayors’ approach in a similar case [2].
In its replies to Reporterre, Suez points out that it invests “several million euros each year” to “comply with standards and regulations while improving water quality and increasing security of supply”.
The unity of elected representatives put to the test
The proposal submitted by Suez in September 2024 has provoked contrasting reactions from elected representatives, which threatens to undermine the unity of the heterogeneous alliance.
Three towns – Grigny, Évry-Courcouronne and Ris-Orangis – categorically rejected the offer and asked the syndicat mixte to refer Suez to the competition authorities for abuse of dominant position and anti-competitive practices. They even did so on their own, at the end of 2024, without waiting for a compromise within the syndicat mixte. I think negotiations are no longer possible. I’ve been waiting for six years,’ says Philippe Rio, mayor of Grigny.
Other elected representatives still believe in negotiations, but have little hope of justice. It is an extremely complicated debate and the choice is a Cornelian one. The competition authority could resolve the issue of the price of tap water, but that will take about ten years if we include all the appeals, and the issue of the ownership of the plants will not be resolved,’ says a source at the joint association.
Negotiations no longer possible
On 13 February, the SESF, which is in danger of becoming politically paralysed just over a year before the local elections, will hold an important meeting. I intend to propose to the members of the union a list of demands that we should put forward in our negotiations with Suez,’ says its president, the socialist mayor of Lieusaint (Seine-et-Marne), Michel Bisson. We are not satisfied with their proposal. If we want to achieve our objective of recovering the resource, we must be united and work together.
Two competing models
This extraordinary confusion is the legacy of the stranglehold that Lyonnaise des Eaux had on the drinking water network, thanks to the rapid urbanisation of the south of the Île-de-France region in the 1960s. Like many of the ‘water wars’ in France, the battle being waged is a confrontation between two models, public and private.
Local authorities want to regain control of drinking water, particularly in order to implement policies to preserve this resource, which is threatened by climate change and pollution. The Eau de Paris water authority, for example, has begun paying farmers to use fewer pesticides and fertilisers around the water catchments used by Parisians.
Many questions and conflicts of use will arise in the future. We know that the low water levels in the Seine, from which we draw our water, will fall and that this is likely to increase the concentration of pollutants. Faced with these challenges, the alliance between local and regional authorities is crucial,” says Michel Bisson. Local authorities want to be able to act in favour of sobriety, which is not in the interests of a private operator who is paid on the basis of consumption.
For their part, the multinational water companies are promoting a model based on technological progress and heavy investment, which will help them to consolidate their position in the “market” for the delegation of public services. In the case of Suez, this strategy has been reinforced by the recent arrival of investment funds (BlackRock from the United States and Meridian from France), which expect a return on their investment.
In the midst of this scrum, the role of another shareholder is being questioned: Caisse des Dépôts et Consignations, the state financial institution that acquired 19% of Suez at the request of the European Commission to save the water division from a takeover bid by rival Veolia in January 2022. We expected that its strategic involvement would lead to a position for Suez that was more in line with the public interest. The opposite has happened. This situation illustrates the serious distortion of the Fund’s mandate,’ denounces Pascal Grandjeat of the association Eau publique Orge Essonne.
Notes
[1] The Réseau interconnecté du Sud francilien (RISF) currently consists of three plants at Morsang-sur-Seine, Viry-Châtillon and Vigneux-sur-Seine and four units drawing water from the Champigny aquifer.
[2] In a decision of 3 February 2024, the Administrative Court of Versailles dismissed Suez’s action against the unilateral decision taken in 2022 by the conurbation of Grand Paris Sud Seine-Essonne-Sénart to set the price per cubic metre at €0.45. The conurbation has since been restructured. The conurbation has since been incorporated into the SESF.
