Paris Letter: Four times between 2001 and 2003, Judge Philippe Courroye asked the European Parliament to lift Jean-Charles Marchiani's immunity from prosecution as an MEP.
In one of the more ironic twists of the case, the Strasbourg Assembly cited Judge Courroye's difficulties with the French administration as a pretext for continuing to protect Marchiani and his mentor, the former interior minister Charles Pasqua, from prosecution on corruption charges.
These "difficulties" were in fact the result of a lawsuit over a legal technicality, filed by Pasqua against the judge. Marchiani, a former intelligence agent whom President Jacques Chirac appointed prefect of the Var department in 1997, also knew how to wield a threat. "We know who you see; we know your informers," he told a nosy journalist.
But Marchiani and Pasqua lost their bid for re-election in the June European elections, and their terms as MEPs expired on July 20th. It was only a question of time before the justice system closed in on Marchiani - and no doubt Pasqua. Since Monday night, Marchiani has resided in the VIP section of Paris's La Santé prison.
An anecdote recounted by an unnamed high-ranking politician explains how the two former MEPs are viewed here. At a cocktail held by Pasqua's RPF party, the two men whispered in Corsican so they could not be understood by guests. "It felt like a scene from The Godfather", the source told Le Monde.
Marchiani's chequered career provides a prime example of the revolving door between French intelligence services, public-sector companies and political office.
Marchiani joined the counter-espionage service in the early 1960s. He was later fired for involvement in a plot to smear the presidential candidate Georges Pompidou with a sex scandal. Peugeot hired him to hunt down trade unionists within the company. He went on to establish the Servair catering service for Air France, a position he used to fund an anti-communist movement in Eritrea.
Following Marchiani's arrest on Monday, President Chirac's pet writer, Denis Tillinac, and the former hostage Jean-Paul Kauffmann came to his defence, describing Marchiani as a courageous man who worked behind the scenes to solve the government's most intractable problems.
Marchiani's greatest exploit was obtaining the liberation of 11 French hostages in Lebanon in 1987 and 1988, when Pasqua was interior minister and Chirac was prime minister. The right-wing politicians wrongly thought that freedom for the hostages would ensure Chirac's election victory over President Francois Mitterrand.
"I'm still alive thanks to him," Kauffmann told Le Monde, referring to Marchiani's trips to Beirut to negotiate with Shia Muslim Lebanese kidnappers. "To save us, he really went into the lions' den. It was extremely dangerous." Though Kauffmann is on the political left, the Kauffmanns and Marchianis celebrate the anniversary of the hostages' release every May.
As Middle East advisor to the French arms and communications group Thomson, Marchiani later negotiated the liberation of French hostages held by the Abu Nidal group. He worked to end the 1994 hijacking of an Air France Airbus by the Algerian GIA. The following year, the newly elected President Chirac asked him to obtain the freedom of two French pilots captured by Bosnian Serbs.
Yet Judge Courroye and Marchiani's detractors, including the former head of the DST (the French equivalent of the CIA) Yves Bonnet, claim he worked for the interests of a political party, not the French state, and filled his pockets along the way.
"In the spy business, we call that an intelligence crook," Bonnet told Le Monde. "The Bosnian affair is revealing. Not only did he not do anything, he got money for it... How could this guy return several times to Chirac's good graces?"
Judge Courroye believes Marchiani accepted millions of euro from Iskandar Safa, the Lebanese middleman in the hostage crisis, took a hefty kickback on a 1990 contract between a Dutch company and Roissy Charles-de-Gaulle airport for a baggage sorting system, and received a commission on a contract between the French defence ministry and the German company Renk for equipping Leclerc tanks sold to the UAE.
He is also implicated in the "Angola-gate" arms scandal and the paying of kickbacks by the Elf oil company in Nigeria. As usual in such cases, personal enrichment and party funding appear to have been intertwined.
The Court of Justice of the Republic, the special tribunal established to prosecute high-ranking officials, is pursuing Mr Pasqua and a few others. Eleven of Pasqua's close relatives and associates are formally under investigation for offences including kickbacks on planning permission for a casino and a new headquarters for the then state-owned company GEC-Alsthom.
French newspapers are hailing Marchiani's arrest as the end of "predatory Gaullism". But the closets of the French left are also filled with financial skeletons, and the fall of Marchiani and Pasqua comes uncomfortably close to President Chirac.
Many doubt they'll ever come to trial.
