PARIS, May 3: Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin came under renewed pressure in a dirty tricks scandal at the heart of the French government on Wednesday, openly accused of lying over claims he ordered a secret investigation into his political rival Nicolas Sarkozy.
Le Monde newspaper reported leaks from the sworn testimony of a senior intelligence official charged with looking into allegations of secret bank accounts, which clearly contradicted Villepin’s version of the so-called Clearstream affair.
The prime minister’s close ally President Jacques Chirac was also drawn further into the scandal, with his office forced to repeat denials that he had guided Villepin’s hand.
In the National Assembly, opposition Socialist Party politicians called on the prime minister to resign.
“Dominique de Villepin lied on the radio. He lied before the nation’s elected representatives. Can France have at its head a prime minister who lies?” said party spokesman Julien Dray.
For the second time in two days Villepin was forced to make a vigorous rebuttal of charges that in January 2004 he had told General Philippe Rondot — head of intelligence at the defence ministry — to investigate Sarkozy and a number of other named politicians.
Claiming to be the ‘object of incessant libellous and unjust attacks’, he told parliament that French politics were “back facing their old demons: imputations, rushed judgments, unsubstantiated allegations, media lynching”.
But the Le Monde leaks upped the ante by exposing discrepancies with the prime minister’s story — which he has repeated several times in the media and parliament — on three key points.
The scandal has its roots in three-year-old claims by an as yet unidentified informant that a number of politicians, business leaders and intelligence figures had accounts at the Luxembourg-based Clearstream bank in which they held illegal commissions paid after the sale of French frigates to Taiwan.
The claims turned out to be bogus, but Sarkozy — interior minister and head of the ruling Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) — believes he was the victim of a plot to smear his name ahead of next year’s presidential election in which he is a leading candidate.
Villepin, who was foreign minister in early 2004, says that he asked Rondot at their meeting to look into general allegations about commissions from the warship sale.
But he says that at that time he knew of no secret list of names linked to Clearstream; that Sarkozy’s name was not brought up at the meeting; and that therefore neither he nor Chirac asked for an investigation into specified individuals.
However in Rondot’s leaked account of the meeting to the two judges looking into the affair, he claims that he saw Jean-Louis Gergorin — a senior executive at the EADS aerospace company — produce a list of suspect account names and numbers in Villepin’s presence.
According to Le Monde, Rondot also says that Sarkozy was personally mentioned at the meeting; and that Villepin made clear his instructions to look into the alleged accounts of named individuals was made with the authority of the president.
Chirac’s office on Wednesday repeated a denial released last week that the president ‘ever ordered the least investigation into political personalities’.
The Clearstream affair has seriously destabilised the centre-right government, which has still a year to run until the end of Chirac’s second mandate in May 2007.—AFP
