François Hollande faces more embarrassment after it emerged that a close friend and treasurer for his presidential election campaign invested in offshore businesses in the Cayman Islands, reports The Guardian.
Jean-Jacques Augier, a publisher who studied with the Socialist president at the elite ENA management school, featured in records leaked from Britain's offshore financial industry, unearthed in a project by the Washington-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) in collaboration with the Guardian and other international media, including Le Monde.
Augier, 59, who once worked as an inspector of finances in France, confirmed the investments and said nothing was illegal. But the revelation comes at a bad time for Hollande, whose government is in crisis following the shock admission by Jerome Cahuzac, the former budget minister and tax tsar, that he had hidden €600,000 in a secret account and repeatedly lied about it.
Hollande was elected on promises to crack down on those who move their money abroad, toughen rules on tax havens, make the world of finance more transparent and ensure the wealthy contribute a larger share to restoring the crisis-hit French economy.
Augier launched a Caymans-based distributor in China in 2005, with a 25% shareholding granted to a British Virgin Islands company. He said his partner in the offshore firm International Bookstores Ltd was Xi Shu, a Chinese businessman.
Read more of this report from The Guardian.
Read Mediapart's exclusive coverage of the Cahuzac affair here and here.