One of the first major scandals involving a nonprofit organization was that of the ARC, the Association for Cancer Research. This organization, founded in 1962 by a former INSERM executive, Jacques Crozemarie, languished for a very long time until he met with communications specialists Michel Simon and Pascal Sarda, who were advised by the firm during the legal proceedings.
They succeeded in increasing fundraising by more than tenfold, thanks to numerous highly targeted mailings with a response rate of around 3 to 4 percent, generating a very significant amount of funds. That is, until 1996, when a report by the Court of Auditors criticized the use of funds raised from the public in 1993. The ARC had funded hundreds of projects, the value of which was never questioned.
Recognized as a public-benefit organization, the association was supported by hundreds of medical specialists. But its prosperity led to its downfall, as well as that of its leader and his public relations staff. For Jacques Crozemarie believed that his invention deserved to be rewarded in the form of gifts, grants, and subsidies for his personal life (such as a swimming pool), which he solicited from his public relations staff.
In June 2000, he was definitively found guilty of breach of trust and misuse of corporate assets, and sentenced to four years in prison, a fine of 2.5 million francs, and 200 million francs in damages to be paid to the ARC. Since one of his communications staff members had died in a car accident before the trial, the other was convicted of being overpaid by the organization, sometimes through tax schemes that were legally questionable but economically viable.
Two key aspects stand out in this trial. First, the difficulty of “making money” in the charitable sector, even though the founders of the system had enabled the organization’s growth and the funding of numerous indisputable projects. Second, the fact that only 27% of the funds raised were allocated to research, with the remainder going toward operating expenses, was symbolically “unacceptable.” Furthermore, sociologically speaking, in France, charitable activity is not supposed to generate profit for those who founded it. In the collective unconscious, it is driven by dedication, charity, and activism, and any “profit” derived from public fundraising is strictly prohibited. Legally, all the tools were in place for criminal prosecution, given the French definitions of breach of trust and misuse of corporate assets.
The second characteristic is that it was one of the first mass trials in France. Under French law, all of the donors were entitled to bring civil actions and seek damages for the “abuses” that had been committed using their contributions. To hold the trial, a 500-seat courtroom had to be set up in the Salle des Pas Perdus of the Paris Courthouse, which was then located on the Île de la Cité. It was the first time such a setup had been used, and there were numerous technical challenges, particularly the seating arrangement, with the defendants in the first two rows and the attorneys ten rows behind. The lessons learned from the mass hearings in this case benefited subsequent trials, such as the Mont Sainte-Odile case (750 seats) and, above all, the AZF case (1,500 seats) and the PIP case (1,300 seats).
The large number of civil parties—a phenomenon nonexistent in other countries—explains the French approach to mass trials. At the International Criminal Court, proceedings take place in a standard courtroom and are video-streamed to other rooms, with a delay of a few minutes to ensure the clarity of what is being said. The key figures in the ARC case are all deceased today. Their successors initially served as the association’s top prosecutors; the association continued to provide the same services as before, but under normal conditions and using the same fundraising methods.