The French body responsible for scrutinising election campaign funding has this week for a second time refused Mediapart’s request for an explanation of its decision to reject Nicolas Sarkozy’s 2012 presidential election campaign accounts, despite a ruling in Mediapart’s favour by an official freedom of information watchdog.
The Commission des comptes de campagne et des financements politiques (CNCCFP), last December announced that the funding of the former president’s failed re-election bid last year exceeded the a 22.509 million-euro ceiling, rejecting Sarkozy’s official accounts that claimed a campaign cost of 21,459,931 euros.
Beginning in January, Mediapart has submitted in vain a series of requests for further explanation of the rejection of Sarkozy’s accounts, and precisely what spending, such as on opinion polls and public meetings, does the CNCCFP believe were omitted in his official declarations.
Sarkozy and his staff, who were given full details of the reasons for the CNCCFP’s decision, have lodged an appeal against it before the Constutional Council (Conseil Constitutionnel).
Election campaign spending is largely refunded by the public purse, on condition that the official accounts are validated by the CNCCFP. To help fund his campaign, Sarkozy borrowed 10.6 million euros from his conservative UMP party, which is itself facing budgetary problems following its poor showing in last summer's parliamentary elections. If the Constitutional Council also rejects the accounts the UMP faces losing the money it loaned.
The outcome is of major importance for the future political ambitions of 58 year-old Sarkozy, who has not ruled out standing as candidate in the next presidential election due in 2017. Furthermore, the rejection of his 2012 accounts follows evidence revealed by Mediapart suggesting his 2007 election campaign was partly funded with illegal donations from late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi and L'Oréal heiress Liliane Bettencourt.
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In February, Mediapart approached the Commission d’accès aux documents administratifs (Cada), which is responsible for ensuring the right of public access to administrative information, as guaranteed by a law passed in 1978. Last month the Cada confirmed Mediapart’s right to consult the CNCCFP's full ruling. The Cada’s president, Serge Daël, said the CNCCFP's decision can be “communicated to anyone who asks for it” as it “has the characteristics of an administrative document”.
But following that advice, the CNCCFP, in a communiqué released this Thursday, again refused to release the details of its decision to reject Sarkozy’s accounts. The CNCCFP has justified its refusal to divulge the details of its conclusions as necessary to ensure that the appeal can be heard without outside interference.
In its May 16th statement, the CNCCFP cited Article 6 of the 1978 law guaranteeing freedom of access to administrative documents which, it argues, allows for an exception to be made in the case where the disclosure of documents “would interfere with procedures engaged before jurisdictions”.
However, the 1978 freedom of information law itself refers back to the Declaration of Human and Citizens’ rights laid down after 1789 French Revolution and which states, in its Article 15, that “Society has the right to call to account every public officer and their administration”.
Socialist Member of Parliament René Dosière, one of two MPs who sit on the Cada’s panel of experts, said the CNCCFP “will have to explain itself”. He said “nothing is opposed” to the immediate disclosure of the details of the Commission’s rejection of Sarkozy’s accounts.
“That our advice has not been followed is a bad message sent out to citizens,” commented Corinne Bouchoux, an EELV Green party Senator who also sits on the Cada panel of experts. “The attitude of the CNCCFP is in danger of fuelling the idea, perhaps wrongly, that it has something to hide. It’s a paradox for a commission that is supposed to promote justice and transparency in political financing.”
“The wisest and most rational move, truth be told, would be that the CNCCFP decision is made public by Nicolas Sarkozy himself,” Bouchoux added.
Behind closed doors
Until now, neither Sarkozy’s campaign treasurer, Philippe Briand, nor his lawyer, have answered Mediapart’s requests for further information. In a statement last December, Briand said "I formally contest the CNCCFP's analysis and decisions" which he described as “unprecedented”.
Briand has claimed the CNCCFP rejected the accounts because they had not included some 1.5 million euros of election expenses spent after the president's formal declaration on 15th February 2012 that he was a candidate for re-election. This sum included 1.06 million euros linked to a major political rally held in 2012 in Villepinte, on the north-east outskirts of Paris, the overall cost of which was around 3 million euros. These sums would have meant the campaign breached the official spending cap by about 350,000 euros or around 1.6% of the overall sum.
However, amid the little information available, the CNCCFP has indicated it was concerned about the period before Sarkozy announced his candidacy, in which he made a number of 'presidential' visits which appeared to many observers as electioneering, and about which complaints were made as early as November 2011. These were not included in the Sarkozy accounts.
The absence of any public disclosure of the details for the CNCCFP’s reasons for rejecting Sarkozy’s accounts ensures that the procedure of his appeal before the Constitutional Council will be held in closed-room secrecy by its panel of former French presidents and senior civil servants and political figures nominated by presidential administrations and parliaments past and present. The logic of the CNCCFP’s decision to keep its report secret is that providing Mediapart with the details would somehow perturb the panel’s ability to arrive at an impartial decision.
In its statement on May 16th, the CNCCFP did however say that its position could be overruled by Constitutional Council President Jean-Louis Debré, a former interior minister and a member of Sarkozy’s conservative UMP party, for which he served as chief whip in parliament's lower house, the National Assembly. Debré is understood to have decided in favour of keeping the CNCCFP document secret, although he has not publicly commented on the issue.
In 1995 the Council approved the presidential election accounts of the defeated conservative candidate Édouard Balladur – who lost to his right-wing rival candidate Jacques Chirac – despite numerous irregularities that prompted the Council's own investigators to advise rejecting the accounts, as revealed by Mediapart in 2010. The Council made its decision behind closed doors and details of the proceedings remained secret for 15 years.
The financing of Balladur's election campaign, for which Sarkozy was the official spokesman, is now the subject of a judicial investigation into evidence suggesting it was part-funded via kickbacks from weapons sales abroad. French radio station France Info today (Friday) reported that the judge leading the investigation, Renaud Van Ruymbeke, has this month found concrete evidence that an intermediary in the arms sales, Abdul Rahman El Assir, secretly paid a US lobbyist and political consultant, Paul Manafort, for his services in helping Balladur's campaign.
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English version by Graham Tearse