FORMER FRENCH prime minister Dominique de Villepin was acquitted yesterday of charges that he plotted to discredit his rival Nicolas Sarkozy and sabotage his campaign for the presidency in 2007.
In its long-awaited verdict in the so-called Clearstream case, a Paris court found there were no grounds to convict the 56-year-old politician of complicity to slander Mr Sarkozy in 2004, when the two men were manoeuvring to succeed Jacques Chirac as president.
The outcome is a personal triumph for Mr Villepin, who has signalled his hope of challenging Mr Sarkozy for the presidency in 2012.
His supporters, many of whom had queued for hours outside the Palais de Justice in Paris yesterday morning, greeted the verdict with cheers and applause.
“After an ordeal of many years, my innocence has been recognised,” Mr Villepin told a scrum of reporters as he left the court.
“I was hurt by the image of politics that was portrayed, of the commitment that I have made over the past 30 years . . . I am now looking to the future, to serve the French people and contribute in a spirit of unity to the recovery of France,” he said.
The long-running Clearsteam affair, pitting two of France’s best-known figures against one another in a case involving secret agents, forgery and layers of political intrigue, has enthralled the country.
It dates back to 2004, when an anonymous informant gave an investigating judge a list purporting to contain the names of politicians, businessmen and journalists who held secret bank accounts at the Luxembourg bank Clearstream.
The accounts were said to have been used for laundering kickbacks from the sale of French frigates to Taiwan.
The most prominent name on the list was Mr Sarkozy’s. Although the judge soon found that the allegations were false and the accounts did not exist, senior intelligence officers were said to have been told to investigate the matter.
Mr Sarkozy saw an attempt to damage him and, suspecting Mr Chirac and Mr Villepin of a plot, vowed to find out where the fraudulent lists had come from. He lodged a legal complaint, as did other figures wrongly accused.
Prosecutors said it was Mr Villepin who prompted the informant, later identified as Jean-Louis Gergorin, a former executive of aerospace group EADS with links to intelligence services, to pass on the list to the judge, even though he knew it to be false.
Mr Villepin, who could have received an 18-month suspended jail sentence and a €45,000 fine if found guilty, had strenuously denied the allegations and accused Mr Sarkozy of pursuing a personal vendetta against him.
In a 326-page ruling read out to a packed courtroom yesterday, Mr Villepin was cleared on all four counts: complicity to slander, to use forgeries, dealing in stolen property and breach of trust.
“I salute the courage of the court, which has allowed justice and the law to triumph over politics,” Mr Villepin said.
“I don’t bear any grudges or rancour.”
His acquittal comes as a blow to Mr Sarkozy, who was a civil plaintiff in the case and has made little attempt to conceal his disdain for his rival. In a statement issued yesterday afternoon, the president said he was satisfied with the verdict and would not appeal.
The court found three of Mr Villepin’s co-defendants guilty. Mr Gergorin and Imad Lahoud, a mathematician accused of falsifying the Clearstream list, were sentenced to 15 and 18 months in prison, respectively, and both also received fines of €40,000.
A third defendant, accountant Florian Bourges, was given a four-month suspended sentence, while a fourth, journalist Denis Robert, was acquitted.