Former French PM guilty of corruption
Saturday, 31 January 2004
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In a stinging reverse for President Jacques Chirac, the former French prime minister Alain Juppé was banned from office for a decade yesterday after being found guilty of corrupt party financing.
In a stinging reverse for President Jacques Chirac, the former French prime minister Alain Juppé was banned from office for a decade yesterday after being found guilty of corrupt party financing.
M. Juppé, 58, the mayor of Bordeaux and head of the President's centre-right party, the UMP, had been expected to run for the presidency in 2007 if M. Chirac, 71, should decide against running again.
M. Juppé will now be banned from doing so - and stripped of his mayorship and party presidency - unless he succeeds in reversing his conviction in the appeal courts. The former prime minister and foreign minister, one of M. Chirac's closest allies for 28 years, may decide to abandon politics while the two-year appeal process goes ahead. He is expected to make an announcement next week.
A court in Nanterre in the Paris suburbs found him guilty yesterday of "taking illegal advantage" of public funds. He was given an 18-month suspended sentence and ordered to serve the mandatory 10-year suspension from elected office. More than a score of other serving or former party colleagues or associates of M. Juppé and M. Chirac were given suspended prison terms.
Yesterday's judgment was a serious blow to M. Chirac and a boost to the rising fortunes of Nicolas Sarkozy, the frenetic Interior Minister, who has declared himself to be the true future of centre-right politics in France. With M. Juppé (prime minister from 1995-97) out of the way, or wounded, M. Sarkozy may bid for the leadership of the UMP in November.
The legal conviction of M. Juppé also amounts to a political indictment of M. Chirac. The offences of which M. Juppé was convicted - embezzling the money of Paris taxpayers by putting seven party officials on the town hall payroll - occurred while M. Chirac was mayor of the French capital. It is generally accepted that the President would also have stood trial if he had not been protected by his immunity as head of state.
During the trial, M. Juppé denied all knowledge of the "fictitious jobs" on the town hall payroll until just before he took steps to correct the situation in 1993. One of the bogus town hall jobs was his own secretary at the headquarters of M. Chirac's RPR party, which has been merged into the UMP. The prosecution argued that it was inconceivable that M. Juppé, as assistant mayor for town hall finances and secretary general of the RPR, did not know that taxpayers' money was being used to fund the party.
It was alleged that this was just a small part of a wider scam, involving scores of RPR officials whose salaries were paid either by the town hall or by private companies who had been promised town hall contracts. That, in turn, was just one of half a dozen alleged illegal schemes to raise funds for the RPR, several of which are still being investigated.
The party was founded by M. Chirac in 1976 and was his personal political warhorse through three presidential campaigns, until he finally reached the Elysée Palace in 1995.
