French interior minister Claude Guéant has dropped the libel action he launched against Mediapart last year over the publication of an editorial denouncing an espionage campaign targeting journalists that had been organized from within the offices of the French presidency.
Guéant's lawyer, Jean-Yves Dupeux, informed a Paris court on Thursday that the lawsuit was withdrawn. Contacted by Mediapart, Dupeux confirmed it had been dropped but declined to comment any further.
The case was due to be heard over three days beginning October 18th, when Mediapart's lawyers, Emmanuel Tordjman and Jean-Pierre Mignard, were to summon some 30 witnesses, mostly media professionals and politicians, and including President Nicolas Sarkozy.
The libel action cited an editorial article by Mediapart Editor-in-Chief Edwy Plenel which denounced a campaign of surveillance and spying on journalists organized by the French president's entourage. The article was published by Mediapart in French and English last November, when Guéant was President Nicolas Sarkozy's chief-of-staff. He was subsequently appointed interior minister during a government reshuffle in February.
Guéant's action followed a series of mysterious break-ins in October last year targeting several media organizations, including Mediapart, involved in highly sensitive investigations into suspected political corruption.
At that time, Mediapart was notably at the forefront of major revelations over the so-called ‘Karachi affair' and the scandal surrounding L'Oréal heiress Liliane Bettencourt, both of which contain very serious potential ramifications for President Nicolas Sarkozy as well as past and present members of the French government.
The Karachi affair involves suspected illegal party financing from a sale of French submarines to Pakistan and the deaths of 11 French naval engineers (more here), and is now the subject of two ongoing judicial investigations.
The Bettencourt scandal has thrown up evidence of suspected illegal party funding, ministerial influence peddling, corruption of the justice system and money laundering (more here), and which are also the subject of current judicial investigations. Key evidence to these are the contents of tapes of conversations between Liliane Bettencourt and her wealth manager Patrice de Maistre. These were secretly-recorded by her majordomo and published by Mediapart in June 2010.
The then-general secretary of President Sarkozy's ruling UMP party, Xavier Bertrand, now Minister of Labour, Employment and Health, publicly accused Mediapart of using "fascist methods" by publishing the tapes. Mediapart launched legal action against him for slander.
Mediapart's editorial offices were broken into on the night of October 7th 2010, when copies of the Bettencourt ‘butler tapes' were stolen along with a hard disk containing confidential files relating to the website's finances and shareholders, and other archives.
On the night of October 21st, the editorial offices of weekly news magazine Le Point were visited by intruders who stole two computers, including a laptop computer belonging to the magazine's editor, Hervé Gattegno. His laptop had reportedly been secured with a chain lock that was found sectioned.
That same day, an apartment belonging to Le Monde features editor Gérard Davet, in charge of the paper's numerous investigations into the Bettencourt affair, was burgled and a laptop computer and GPS device were stolen. Nothing else was taken, despite the presence of what Davel described as "objects of value". Davet had already been targeted by official attempts to spy on his phone records, and which became the subject of two lawsuits filed by the paper for breaches of the French law guaranteeing journalists the secrecy of their sources.
'The Elysée Palace versus Mediapart'
In the editorial which prompted Guéant's libel action, Mediapart's Edwy Plenel referred to espionage and surveillance operations organized from within the presidential offices of the Elyséee Palace. Based on information gained from a number of sources, Plenel wrote: "Above all, we have been told that this state-organised inquisition was and is instigated and coordinated by Elysée Palace Secretary General, Claude Guéant, himself. "They've gone wild", confided a high-ranking government minister to one of his close entourage, who in turn informed us of the phrase he used. This source has assured us that the minister knew, as of September, that those media organisations at the forefront of reporting on the Bettencourt scandal were to be the subject of clandestine operations, explicitly citing Mediapart, Le Point and Le Monde."
Contacted Thursday by Mediapart, a member of Guéant's entourage, who asked not to be named, commented: "At the time, Claude Guéant was not a political figure but a senior civil servant and he had been truly hurt by what he felt were particularly unjust ad hominem attacks."
While Guéant's libel suit was undoubtedly intended to intimidate, it also further fuelled controversy over the illegal practices used by state officials to try to muzzle the press. In a subsequent editorial, published in English on November 22nd, Edwy Plenel wrote that it was designed "to put an end to troublesome questions, to impress accommodating media and to blacklist impertinent journalists."
He concluded: "Claude Guéant's lawsuit is the Elysée Palace versus Mediapart. That is the challenge laid down to us, and we will turn this into a trial about those aspects of this presidency that lie in the shadows. We will make it a trial about defending press freedom, about freedom of information, about the rights of citizens to inform journalists. In short, it will be about defending a true democracy in which secrecy is the exception and transparency the rule. We will supply proof, we will present testimony and we will prove our good faith. The first witness that we will call to testify will, obviously, be the one who is in fact prosecuting us from behind his agent: Nicolas Sarkozy."
Meanwhile, despite Guéant's U-turn, French satirical and investigative weekly Le Canard enchaîné remains the target of libel action by another of President Sarkozy's close entourage, Bernard Squarcini, head of the French domestic intelligence service, the DCRI. Squarcini launched his lawsuit within days of that of Guéant last autumn, after Le Canard enchaîné suggested his services were directly involved in the phone tapping of journalists.
"Bernard Squarcini has not withdrawn his lawsuit against us," commented a spokesperson for the weekly. "The publication's editorial directors, Michel Gaillard and Claude Angeli, were in fact a few days ago placed under investigation for libel."
In an article dated November 10th 2010, Canard enchaîné editor Claude Angeli reported that police surveillance operations were mounted against "Mediapart journalists [who] interested themselves too closely in the Woerth-Bettencourt affair and in the retro-commissions cashed in after the delivery of submarines to Pakistan [...] Two cases that could not be more worrisome for the Elysée."
-------------------------
English version: Graham Tearse