Nestlé Mineral Water Affair: Did the State Play Down the Scandal?

He waits slumped in the club chair, over the bubbles of a Perrier, which is not without mischievousness given the subject of the meeting: the Nestlé affair and the future of its century-old brand. Outside, the sun is splashing down on the Place de la République in Paris. But the café's gloom is more suited to his convalescent state. On April 30, Aurélien Rousseau, a deputy from Place publique des Yvelines, still groggy after surgery, spoke to the Senate's commission of inquiry into bottled water about his actions when he led Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne's forty or so advisors between May 2022 and July 2023.

The government arbitration that, in February 2023, allowed the company to continue to mask the contamination of its sources by substituting a contested disinfection system for the prohibited treatments used to remove bacteria and pesticides from its bottles? A document received among a thousand others each year at the "terminus of hassles"