I was not paid to promote crypto scams
A French lawmaker has been accused of promoting limocoin swap (LMCSWAP), a “suspicious” African crypto project – but denies claims he was paid to talk up the coin in the National Assembly by lobbyists.
The claims were the latest to emerge from Le Monde newspapers and MediaPart’s investigations into an Israel-based firm called Team Jorge.
MediaPart and Le Monde explained that last year Member of Parliament, Hubert Julien-Laferrière, made “off-topic” remarks about a token called limocoin swap (LMCSWAP) at a meeting of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the National Assembly.
The media referred to the token as a “cryptocurrency launched by Cameroonian businessman Emile Parfait Simb.” Since 2022, they noted, hundreds of individuals have accused Parfait Simb of orchestrating a Ponzi scheme.
A report by Jeune Afrique in August 2022 explained that the businessman had emptied his bank accounts and fled his home country.
The coin is built on the Binance-powered BNB chain – and complaints at the end of the year received a response from Binance Africa.
Julien-Laferrière represents the Ecologist-NUPES coalition of parties and was elected to serve as Member of Parliament in the center of Lyon. He began his career as an MP in 2017.
And investigators claimed they had evidence the MP was paid to speak about limocoin swaps in the French parliament by lobbyist Jean-Pierre Duthion.
French lawmaker: “No one paid me to talk about crypto in parliament”
After the allegations were made public, MP took to Twitter to claim that he “wasn’t paid by anyone”.
He wrote:
“I vehemently deny the allegations that I am ‘at the service’ of Duthion. I refute the idea that I could abuse my status […] in any way…”
Julien-Laferrière claimed that his “cryptocurrency”-related comments “constituted a manifest error of judgment.”
But he claimed there was “no other episode” that “could suggest” that he would “act under the influence of Duthion or any other lobbyist.”
Duthion has been accused of colluding with BFM-TV news presenter Rachid M’Barki in a scandal that has rocked French media. Investigators allege that M’Barki took payments from Team Jorge to report on stories at the latter’s request.
BFM-TV has suspended M’Barki pending an internal investigation.
Julien-Laferrière is said to have denied taking money from Duthion. But he reportedly admitted to meeting the lobbyist in “top Parisian restaurants” on several occasions – with Duthion footing the bill in each case.
Parfait Simb, meanwhile, is said to have left Cameroon in the spring of 2022. In January, RFI reported that he has taken up residence in the Central African Republic.
The same media claimed that last year Parfait Simb launched the so-called “African Organization of Russophony”, a pro-Russian group allied with a Russian university and social media “influencers”.
Le Monde reported that a petition to remove the coin from major platforms had already received around 8,000 signatures.
The same media noted that it was “able to identify” several Twitter accounts that “appear to have been created between the end of 2021 and the beginning of 2022 with the aim of defending” limocoin exchange, affiliates and Parfait Simb .
However, the paper noted that “these accounts do not appear to be linked to Team Jorge’s network of fake accounts.”
Alleged victims have claimed that Liyeplimal, the company that issued limocoin exchange “conducted” a “carpet pull”.
“Rug pull” scams typically see an issuer launch a crypto and suddenly disappear with investors’ funds.
A number of Twitter accounts have dubbed the coin – whose current market cap is around $0.002 (down from peaks of nearly $9) – “Africa’s bitcoin”.
On the project’s website, Liyeplimal claimed it would pay investors “interest” every week – and gave details of a series of “24-month” “staking contracts” that offered returns of up to 74%.
The website appears not to have been updated since early 2022.
