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WE had discussed in this column three years ago a rather spooky case concerning Jerome Cahuzac, at that time newly appointed minister for budget and a man close to President François Hollande whose own election campaign in 2012 was based on the slogan “I hate the rich, yes I do!”
Then, in came the shocking revelation by Mediapart, an internet news site, that Cahuzac possessed millions of euros in secret bank accounts that allowed him to avoid paying taxes. A ridiculously self-contradictory detail of the scoop was that as minister for budget one of Cahuzac’s principal tasks was to order investigations against tax evaders!
Yet, his fast travelling bank accounts — from the Isle of Man to Switzerland to Panama to Mauritius and then finally to Singapore — would have remained no more than another run-of-the-mill scandal that few people would have been interested in, but with Cahuzac’s joining the Socialist government as minister, the entire affair took a new and disproportionate dimension.
Faced with the question at the National Assembly in March 2013, Jerome Cahuzac looked hard into the eyes of the audience as well as into the lenses of TV cameras and said, “I swear upon my honour these accusations have no ground. I do not, never did, possess any foreign bank accounts.”
More details were dug up by the media and it was soon revealed that Jerome and his wife Patricia Cahuzac had made their fortune after running for many years a hair transplant and other aesthetic operations clinic but only declaring meagre amounts to the French income tax bureau. With the earnings the couple had bought a number of luxury flats in Paris as well as in London.
It took the authorities three and a half years to complete the investigation and early this week Cahuzac appeared before the judges to face the combined charges of “fiscal fraud, money laundering and false revenue declarations”.
Patricia Cahuzac, who had left her husband soon after the scandal broke out, also appeared in court and told the judges she and her three children enjoyed a good living but their earnings hit the ground level after Jerome joined the Socialist government. The accused himself admitted that becoming a minister was perhaps the most stupid mistake he ever made in his life. “I would have been a happier man had I not become a politician”, he said.
But despite many hearings during the week, Cahuzac never admitted to his crime openly. He gave the case a new, unexpected turn when he told the judges that the transfer of money to the Singapore account was actually a political manoeuvre in order to finance the presidential election campaign of Michel Rocard who, by the way, was prime minister under President François Mitterrand between 1988 and 1991.
A very interesting detail indeed, the only trouble being that Michel Rocard died on July 2 this year and while so far nobody has been able to confirm the defendant’s claim, belief is getting widespread that Jerome Cahuzac is probably a compulsive liar.
Or possibly even a mental case, some suggest.
Cahuzac’s ambiguous declarations lend credence to the presumption. A well-dressed and good-looking man, he told the judges François Hollande had asked him if the particulars published in the papers about his foreign bank accounts were true.
“I replied they were simply stupidities.”
As far as Hollande is concerned, his comment during a television interview last week was more precise: “Jerome Cahuzac deceived the highest authorities of the republic i.e. the president, the government, the parliament and the entire nation.”
The prosecutor rounded up the case on Wednesday, proposing three- and two-year imprisonment for Jerome and Patricia Cahuzac, respectively. The verdict is to be pronounced on December 8.
The writer is a journalist based in Paris
Published in Dawn September 18th, 2016
