FRANCE: President Jacques Chirac yesterday delivered his strongest defence yet of his protege, prime minister Dominique de Villepin, who is labouring under suspicions that he used the French intelligence service in a failed attempt to discredit his arch rival, the interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy.
Looking tired and stooped, Mr Chirac made an unusual surprise statement on French television after the morning cabinet meeting. "The republic is not a dictatorship of rumours, a dictatorship of slander," he said.
"Democracy is not the disrespect and exploitation to outrageous lengths of legal procedures under way," Mr Chirac added, referring to the investigation into phoney lists of account holders, among them French politicians, which were posted by an anonymous informant to French judges in May 2004.
"I have full confidence in Dominique de Villepin's government to carry out the mission I have set it," Mr Chirac continued.
As the respected satirical weekly Le Canard enchaîné noted yesterday: "The manoeuvre which aimed to destabilise Sarko with phoney lists has long since become a Sarkozyste war machine against the Villepin clan."
The informant is believed to be Jean-Louis Gergorin, the vice-president of the defence consortium EADS (the parent company of Airbus) and a friend of Villepin, who yesterday took a leave of absence from his job "in order to concentrate on the best means of defending himself", according to a statement by EADS.
In 2001 Judge Renaud Van Ruymbeke was assigned to investigate allegations of kickbacks in the 1991 sale of French frigates to Taiwan. Several mysterious deaths had occurred in connection with the affair.
On April 30th, 2004, the judge met Mr Gergorin in a lawyer's office. "He appeared terrified and said his life was in danger," Judge Van Ruymbeke told Le Monde.
Mr Gergorin told the judge it was too dangerous for him to make an official affidavit, but that French politicians and industrialists had laundered kickbacks from the frigate sale through the Clearstream bank in Luxembourg. Although Mr Gergorin did not mention Nicolas Sarkozy, the right-wing leader's name appeared in the documents and CD-roms that arrived several days later through the post.
"I am angry that they made me waste my time, that they laid a trap for me," Judge Van Ruymbeke said of the list, which turned out to be bogus. "Today, I realise how extensively I was manipulated." In early 2004, when he allegedly asked Gen Philippe Rondot to investigate the Clearstream bank, Mr Villepin told several people that he "had" Sarkozy. "He went a little crazy over this affair," Stéphane Denis, a prominent writer, says in Le Point magazine.
In another new twist to the Clearstream scandal, Le Canard enchaîné published a hitherto overlooked excerpt from Gen Rondot's deposition before investigating magistrates on March 28th. Gen Rondot, a former intelligence officer who was until December 2005 a member of the defence minister's cabinet, said Mr Chirac holds an account at the Tokyo Sowa bank valued at €45 million by the French intelligence service DGSE.
Gen Rondot said the account received substantial and regular lodgements from a cultural foundation on whose board Mr Chirac sat. The Élysée categorically denied the report, and Gen Rondot's lawyer, Eric Morin, said his client's testimony had been taken out of context, that the general "had no idea" whether such an account existed and was only citing a DGSE report.
Le Canard enchaîné is the investigative newspaper which decades ago revealed that the then president, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, accepted a gift of diamonds from Emperor Bokassa. Nicolas Beau, who wrote the Canard article, stands by his story.
In the verbatim account of Gen Rondot's testimony seen by Beau, "he said several times, in a very affirmative way, that the head of state has - in the present tense - an account at the Tokyo Sowa bank, an establishment which belonged to Soichi Osada, a friend of Mr Chirac," Beau told French radio. "He was extremely articulate and precise. This former intelligence officer is credible." The opposition socialists smell blood and yesterday announced they will lodge a no-confidence motion against the Villepin government this week, with a debate likely in the National Assembly on May 23rd.
"Chirac must leave," said a statement issued by five socialist deputies. "It is not possible to imagine our nation living through another 12 months of these clashes, affairs and dirty tricks." The deputies called for early presidential and parliamentary elections.