IT HAS been billed as France’s political trial of the decade, a saga worthy of the darkest spy thriller that threatens to expose poisonous machinations and backstabbing at the highest reaches of the French state.
This morning, in the courtroom where Marie-Antoinette was ordered to be beheaded in 1793, a legal battle will begin that is unprecedented in modern French history. France’s president, Nicolas Sarkozy, is the key plaintiff in a trial accusing the former prime minister Dominique de Villepin of running an elaborate smear campaign to damage Mr Sarkozy’s chances in the 2007 presidential election campaign.
If Mr De Villepin is found guilty of a plot to torpedo Mr Sarkozy’s political career, he could face five years in prison.
But the so-called “Clearstream” trial involves not just the all-consuming hatred and rivalry between two of France’s most prominent politicians, it also threatens to damage the standing of the French intelligence services and business world.
Scores of plaintiffs and witnesses from the highest levels of French politics, senior spies and businessmen, will take part in the trial which former president Jacques Chirac warned would damage the entire French political class.
Mr Sarkozy is so bent on justice that he has vowed to hang those responsible for the alleged plot “on a butcher’s hook”. Mr De Villepin, who privately refers to Mr Sarkozy as “the dwarf”, denies wrongdoing, saying the president is “obsessed” and “meddling” in the justice system.
The saga dates back to 2004, when Sarkozy and De Villepin were rival ministers under Chirac and both possible runners for the 2007 presidency. Sarkozy, the ambitious finance minister who had turned against Chirac, was the favourite to lead the country. De Villepin, who served as foreign and interior minister before becoming prime minister, was an aristocratic career diplomat.
In the summer of 2004, an anonymous source wrote to one of France’s investigating judges, accusing a string of politicians and businessmen of holding secret bank accounts at the Luxembourg bank Clearstream. The accounts were said to have been used for laundering kickbacks from the €1.66 billion sale of French frigates to Taiwan in 1991.
On the lists of supposedly crooked account holders were scores of politicians from the right and left, top businessmen and leading journalists. The most prominent name was Sarkozy’s. The judge soon found that the allegations were false and the accounts did not exist. However, senior intelligence officers and France’s top spymasters were said to have been tasked with investigating the matter, in what Sarkozy saw as a move to “sully” his name.
Sarkozy suspected Chirac and De Villepin of a plot and vowed to find out where the fake lists had come from. He lodged a legal complaint, as did other figures wrongly accused. The court must now decide how the lists came to light, how much De Villepin knew about them, when he learned that they were fake and whether he sought to take advantage of them.
Prosecutors will argue that De Villepin prompted his friend, Jean-Louis Gergorin, an executive of the defence aviation group Eads with links to intelligence services, to pass on the list confidentially to the judge, even though he knew it to be false. De Villepin flatly denies the charges and says he is the victim of a grave “injustice”.
De Villepin is charged with “complicity in slander, the use of forged documents and possession of goods obtained by breach of trust and theft”. Beside him in the dock are Gergorin and his associate Imad Lahoud, a former trader and computer specialist accused of faking the list; management consultant Florian Bourges, accused of stealing Clearstream documents; and journalist Denis Robert, who broke the story. They deny the charges. – (Guardian service)
