A senior French arms industry executive has admitted writing an
anonymous letter at the heart of a dirty tricks scandal shaking the
government, but denied it was to help Prime Minister Dominique de
Villepin smear a rival.
Jean-Louis Gergorin said in an interview published yesterday
that he alerted Villepin to a list of suspicious bank accounts
allegedly belonging to politicians and civil servants, but it did
not mention Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy.
Villepin's authority has been seriously damaged by charges he
tried to smear Sarkozy, a leading contender in next year's
presidential race, by prolonging a secret probe into what he
quickly found out was a faked list of suspected bribe-takers.
Gergorin's admission answered one of the many questions in the
saga, but he declined to say who produced other letters and lists
that targeted Sarkozy, who denies any wrongdoing.
Gergorin said he discussed the list with judge Renaud Van
Ruymbeke, who was investigating a bribe-ridden 1991 arms export
deal, but would not repeat this in a formal deposition. "That led
to the anonymous letter," he told the daily Le Parisien.
While confirming that he wrote the first anonymous letter in May
2004, Gergorin denied being the "crow" French slang for a writer of
poison-pen letters that magistrates and media have been hunting
feverishly for weeks.
"A crow is an anonymous informer acting in bad faith," said
Gergorin, who stepped down from his post as vice president for
strategic co-ordination at the European aerospace and defense
company EADS in order to defend his name in the scandal.
"By going to see the investigating magistrate, I was not
anonymous," he said.
A role for Russian mafia?
The scandal has dominated the Paris political scene so much that
President Jacques Chirac lectured his ministers at the weekly
cabinet meeting on Wednesday that they must work harder at
advertising government successes on jobs and the economy.
Villepin has denied any wrong-doing over the tangled
"Clearstream affair," named after the Luxembourg bank where Sarkozy
was wrongly suspected of having secret accounts.
But he has failed to dispel suspicions of foul play. While few
think he can now succeed his mentor Chirac as president in
elections next year, Villepin has refused to quit.
In evidence of his weakened position, more than half the
deputies in his party boycotted his speech during debate on a
censure motion brought on Tuesday by the left-wing opposition.
In a report that could shed light on the origins of the murky
scandal, the daily Le Monde said Gergorin mentioned the
Clearstream lists of bank transfers to Van Ruymbeke because he
believed they pointed to a bid by "Russian oligarchs" to take over
the Lagardere arms and media group.
Lagardere is a core shareholder in EADS and its founder,
Jean-Luc Lagardere, died in hospital in 2003 aged 75 under
mysterious circumstances later described as a rare disease.
Gergorin believed "Lagardere was murdered by the Russian mafia,"
according to the leaked text Le Monde published from
testimony by Van Ruymbeke to the Clearstream inquiry last week.
In his interview with Le Parisien, Gergorin hinted he
thought Lagardere had been murdered and that foreign investors were
buying up Lagardere group shares in a bid to control it.
He gave no further details but said he approached Van Ruymbeke
in April 2004 because he thought a confidential probe launched by
Villepin in January was not going quickly enough.
(China Daily May 19, 2006)
