When Mediapart first broke the story about Jérôme Cahuzac and his secret Swiss bank account the budget minister immediately called in the public relations big guns to defend him. The spin doctor Stéphane Fouks and his team at Havas Worlwide/EuroRSCG prepared the minister's strategy. But has the recourse to crisis communications backfired, and is it now starting to work against Jérôme Cahuzac's interests?
On Monday December 3rd Mediapart sent five questions for the minister to answer, asking at the same time for an interview with him. Stéphane Fouks was going to organise the response. But since then the repeated and virulent denials by the minister have led him into making spoken and written claims that have opened the door to fresh questions. In particular the declarations in no way answer the various issues we have raised about his Swiss bank account, his wealth manager and his business affairs. Indeed, ten days after Mediapart's revelations the minister's line of defence appears vague and hazy, at times showing evidence of dangerous contradictions.
The question marks, improbable explanations and silences surrounding the minister currently boil down to five points.
1. The tax authorities' alert in 2008
During Mediapart's meeting with the minister on Tuesday December 4th prior to publication of the initial story he categorically denied the existence of any report or note alerting the tax authorities to his case. The following morning, however, questioned on RTL radio, he admitted that a report written in 2008 by tax inspector Rémy Garnier did indeed exist. He even gave a copy to RTL journalist Jean-Michel Aphatie, and then proceeded to deny it any credibility, questioning the character of the author and highlighting factual errors in it.
Since then the many public declarations made by the tax inspector have allowed the matter to be put into perspective. The tax official has always insisted that his research did not allow him to “confirm or disprove” the existence of a Swiss account that “several sources outside the tax authorities” had brought to his attention. He also recognised that errors had been made in the report in relation to Cahuzac's property holdings, as the investigation had lacked sufficient resources behind it. However, the official highlighted another passage in his report that spoke of “anomalies” in Cahuzac's tax declarations.
“In Jérôme Cahuzac's tax file I noticed apparent and quantified anomalies,” Rémy Garnier told Le Parisien. “Income had been omitted. Thus a tax deduction of an amount which, even if it did not represent a lot for someone like Cahuzac, represented a worker's annual salary. It also lacked supporting documentation. I don't understand how the tax authorities don't ask questions of such a taxpayer on the pretext that he is a Member of Parliament.”
Why was his request for an investigation into Cahuzac's tax situation turned down? Why did this request lead to this tax official being 'sidelined', followed by years of conflict which concluded in the dismissal of Rémy Garnier, a dismissal signed off in 2008 by UMP budget minister Éric Woerth, but ultimately quashed? Why was Woerth one of the first to support Cahuzac?
So the attempt to formally demolish Remy Garnier and his report partially failed. The questions it raises are more than legitimate and require answers. Moreover, two new fronts against the minister have been opened up; the questioning of the accuracy of his tax declarations , and his relations with Éric Woerth.
2. The recording of the 2000 conversation
The second point that weakens the minister's defence is the absence of a clear denial over the recording we have put online which is of a conversation involving Cahuzac at the end of 2000. In it he recognises the existence of an account at UBS and worries about the possibility of closing this Geneva account. We have stated at Mediapart that we are sure of the authenticity of this recording and of the fact that it definitely involves a conversation between Jérôme Cahuzac and his business advisor.
To this day the minister has given no explicit denial about this recording, its authenticity, the people taking part in the conversation and its content. He has simply retorted in a statement that “none of the claimed material that Mediapart says it has is convincing, they don't impress me nor can they weaken my determination”. Yet these elements are clearly convincing for anyone who takes the trouble to listen carefully to the recording, which is admittedly of mediocre quality. Moreover Mediapart has information on the circumstances in which the recording was made and of the person who possesses it.
Jérôme Cahuzac did not know of the existence of this recording, or at least that is what he said on RTL on December 5th, just before Mediapart put it online. His inability today to deny it puts him in a delicate position.
3. The trip to Geneva at the start of 2010
Questioned about it on December 3rd just before the publication of Mediapart's first story, Jérôme Cahuzac implicitly denied making a trip to Geneva right at the beginning of 2010 to – as Mediapart's investigation stated - close his UBS account. “No more than [making a trip to] Turin, Milan or New York,” he replied, refusing to be more precise despite further questioning.
On December 5th, once more on RTL, the minister changed his mind. “Were you in Geneva at the start of 2010?” the RTL journalist Jean-Michel Aphatie asked the minister. “I did make a trip, one that Mediapart describes as discreet, which was so discreet that I had to get the ticket via the transport service at the National Assembly...” Cahuzac replied, with irony. And he claimed: “I am in the process of looking precisely at what the dates were” later repeating “I will look at what the precise dates are.”
Since then the minister has not been in a position to make public this ticket ordered through the National Assembly travel service any more than he has pinpointed the precise date of his trip.
Cahuzac has since explained the reasons for this journey, which was to meet “informants, who were sending me information of a tax nature and which seemed to me more or less serious enough to see what it was about”. This reason seems, to say the least, strange and improbable. Cahuzac was not yet at that time the president of the Assembly's finance committee and no specific parliamentary mission was under way that would have made it necessary for him to go to Geneva. The idea that a French MP would take such a step in isolation has been met with scepticism in Switzerland itself. Questioned by the Geneva-based newspaper Le Temps Michel Dérobert, secretary general of the Swiss Private Bankers Association said: "I don't know the nature of this trip. But I start from the premise that it was not an official assignment. If it was, he should have said so."
Therefore Mediapart's information on this trip to Geneva, private in nature, and its purpose – to close the UBS account – have not been refuted.
4 Jérôme Cahuzac's business advisor
In an investigation published earlier this week Mediapart revealed how Jérôme Cahuzac has worked for many years with a business advisor or wealth manager, Hervé Dreyfus. Moreover, according to Mediapart's sources it is to him that Cahuzac is talking in the 2000 recording Mediapart has published online. Hervé Dreyfu has set up several companies, including Hervé Dreyfus Finance with the support of an influential Swiss financier Dominique Reyl. Dreyfus is also one of the directors and partners of the group Raymond James Asset Management International.
In its edition of Thursday December 13th Swiss daily Le Temps added several details to this background. The first is that Hervé Dreyfus and Dominique Reyl are half-brothers and thus more than just business partners. The second is that the minister's wealth manager is a “well-connected man close to [former French president] Nicolas Sarkozy and his ex-wife Cécilia”. Mediapart has already stated that Jérôme Cahuzac was introduced to Dreyfus by his brother Antoine Cahuzac.
In Mediapart's investigation published on December 11th we also explained the business interests that enabled Jérôme Cahuzac to make a fortune very soon after leaving the office of health minister Claude Evin in 1991. One was the Cahuzac clinic, set up in 1991 with his wife, the other was a consultancy practice Cahuzac Conseil which was created in 1993 and which allowed him to benefit from his links with the pharmaceuticals industry.
Neither Hervé Dreyfus nor the minister has chosen to comment on these various revelations. They have not responded to Mediapart's calls and no statements from either has been forthcoming to contradict or deny the details of this investigation after its publication. However on RTL radio on December 5th Cahuzac was questioned about whether he had been in discussions with a business advisor and he replied that he had never met “people like that”.
5. Questions over a flat bought in 1994
The final point on which the minister has not provided clarification concerns issues that he himself raised, namely the circumstances surrounding the 1994 purchase of a luxury flat for 6.2 million francs – about 945,000 euros – on avenue de Breteuil in Paris.
In previous articles Mediapart published the brief official purchase contract for this flat, dated October 28th 1994, according to which Jérôme Cahuzac paid four million francs (about 600,000 euros) “of his own money”, with just one third being funded by a bank loan. Mediapart noted: “Nothing enables us to say today if the money came from the Swiss account, but that question seems to have crossed the mind of the tax inspector [Remy Garnier] who was unable to verify his suspicions in 2008.”
Enlargement : Illustration 2
Jérôme Cahuzac also made the link on his own blog, writing: “An online media outlet claims to be able to show that this money hidden in a Swiss account enabled me to finance my Parisian flat in an illicit way.” In fact, Mediapart had never stated that. The minister also announced that the “financial plan” for the purchase of the flat would soon be published on his blog.
Yet what the minister published are details he said were given to him by his notaire and which contain several glaring errors. One is the presence of a loan and the proceeds of the resale of a flat from after the date when the apartment was bought. Another is the mentionof a BNB Parisbas cheque, even though this bank did not exist at the time of the purchase (it was created in 2000).
“The full purchase document is in the process of being made anonymous [editor's note, to protect the identity of uninvolved third parties named in it] and will be published in several hours,” Cahuzac wrote on his blog on December 6th. To this date it has not appeared, and no responses have been provided regarding the mistakes in the statement provided by the notaire.
Some observers have asked that Mediapart provides the “proof” regarding the allegations. We simply want to underline the number and seriousness of the details that we have already produced. Faced with these facts, these documents, these accounts, the budget minister cannot continue with a stance of outraged denials. Otherwise he risks making his own position untenable and by association that of the government of which he is a minister.
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English version by Michael Streeter