The Mayor’s New Clothes: Luxury on the Paris Taxpayers’ Dime
Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo arrives at The Élysée Presidential Palace ahead of a state dinner on June 5, 2025.
Ludovic Marin / AFP
- Tags: Anne Hidalgo, corruption, France, Hélène de Lauzun, Paris, scandal
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For months, Anne Hidalgo, the socialist mayor of Paris, has refused to disclose her expense reports to the public, as required by law. Forced to do so by the courts—thanks to the tenacity of a journalist and a determined watchdog group—she finally handed over her receipts, exposing the insane scale of her personal purchases financed by Parisian taxpayers. This goes beyond individual misconduct: it is part of a systemic abuse, emblematic of a political caste that has held positions of responsibility in France for decades without ever being held to account.
The first credit for these revelations goes to Stefan de Vries, a Dutch journalist. Since 2019, he has been waging a relentless war against the mayor of the French capital to get her to publish—as she is legally obliged to do—details of her professional expenses financed by Parisian taxpayers. His investigation was prompted by a legitimate curiosity about how Paris had managed to win the coveted right to host the 2024 Olympic Games. In March 2023, after years of delaying tactics on the part of Hidalgo and her staff, the Council of State took up de Vries’ cause and finally authorised him to visit the City Hall offices to collect the precious supporting documents. An initial set of receipts was then released to the French press.
Today, the case has resurfaced with the disclosure in the press of a multitude of new receipts and invoices related to Hidalgo’s expenses during the last years of her term of office—documents requested and obtained by Transparence Citoyenne, an anti-corruption association, building on the groundwork carried out by Stefan de Vries. Like the Dutch journalist, the association initially encountered a wall of silence. Its request, submitted in March 2024, took months to come to fruition.
The 118 receipts sent to the association last April correspond to items purchased by Anne Hidalgo between June 2020 and April 2024, for a total amount of €75,050.65. The details are striking. They include both luxury designer clothing and everyday items that are difficult to justify as “representation expenses.”
Upon closer inspection, inconsistencies, not to say scandals, abound. The mayor’s office has always defended its purchases of high-end brands on the grounds that, as mayor of the capital of luxury and elegance, Hidalgo had a duty to fly the flag for French fashion. How, then, can we explain the purchase of a coat from the British brand Burberry for just over €3,000? But there’s more: A careful examination of the receipts shows that Anne Hidalgo did not just buy clothes for her own use but also allowed her entourage to take advantage of her payment facilities. The sizes of the clothes vary from one day to the next; there are receipts for clothes in size 36—which, with all due respect to the mayor of Paris, is objectively not the size of a woman of her stature. On another day, she bought four pairs of jeans of the same model, one in size 42, two in 40 and one in 38. In case she feels like going on a diet?
Other expenses are pure pettiness: Anne Hidalgo has claimed the purchase of her Legion of Honour pins as business expenses, which is prohibited by law. The Legion of Honour is an honorary decoration, not a work tool. And what about the three massages paid for at the spa of the luxury Okura Tokyo hotel during one of her undoubtedly exhausting trips to Japan? “What accountant, auditor, ethics officer, URSSAF inspector or tax inspector would accept this in a private company, even during a business trip?” asks one internet user, with good reason.
The Left, keen to defend its champion, has found a counterargument: Transparence Citoyenne allegedly received funds from Pierre-Edouard Stérin, the universal villain and financier of the far Right. But even if that were true, Hidalgo’s abuses remain nonetheless real.
Since the publication online on Wednesday, September 17th, of supporting documents on Transparence Citoyenne’s X account, web investigators have been having a field day, at the invitation of the association, which encourages internet users to comment and contribute their findings and observations. For example, we discover that Anne Hidalgo spent more than €14,000 in a single shop called Apostrophe, owned by a certain Patrick Hazan. The entrepreneur was on her support committee in 2014 and again in 2020 and, by happy coincidence, won the contract to renovate the Hôtel de Coulanges, a 17th-century architectural gem transformed into a luxury concept store, thanks to the support of a socialist councillor on the Paris Council.
Faced with this flood of revelations, the woman nicknamed “Notre-Drame de Paris” is keeping her head down and insists she has “no lessons to learn about ethics.” Some of her close associates are forced to acknowledge “a blunder,” reveals Le Parisien.
The issue of luxury clothing is a sensitive one in the political memory of the French. It should be remembered that in 2017, the favourite candidate of the conservative Right, François Fillon, fell from grace a few months before the presidential election, which he had every chance of winning, over a story involving two luxury suits that had been given to him improperly when he was a member of parliament. The estimated value of the suits was around €6,500 each. They were given to him as gifts.
Today, we are talking about tens of thousands of euros for Ms. Hidalgo, all funded by public money. Responsible for a deficit of more than €10 billion in France’s largest city, the mayor of Paris should have resigned long ago, but the French Left enjoys a privilege of immunity that is clearly unlimited. All this to garner less than 2% of the vote in the elections. In these great revelations, at least one thing is certain: Anne Hidalgo was quite incapable of buying voters.
