France

President Hollande tries to restore his authority after political earthquake of Cahuzac confession

In a brief pre-recorded television appearance President François Hollande sought to regain the political initiative after the damaging and hugely embarrassing admission by his former budget minister Jérôme Cahuzac that he did have a secret Swiss bank account. However, two of the three policy proposals unveiled by the president to prevent further scandals had already been announced and the third may face constitutional obstacles. Meanwhile the opposition says the president failed to answer key questions about his own role in the Cahuzac affair, as pressure also mounted on another key government figure, finance minister Pierre Moscovici.

Stéphane Alliès and michael streeter

This article is freely available.

In the end it amounted to just a modest updating of government policy. On Wednesday morning the president's office at the Elysée had revealed that François Hollande would be making a – pre-recorded – television address to the nation in the wake of former budget minister Jérôme Cahuzac's dramatic admission that he had lied to everyone about his secret Swiss bank account.

Shortly after noon the recording was broadcast, with President Hollande standing bolt upright and visibly angry as he delivered his brief message. “Jérôme Cahuzac has deceived the highest authorities, the head of state, the government, it's an unpardonable fault, it's an outrage committed against the Republic,” stated the president.

Then, in what one TV pundit described as a “re-writing of history”, François Hollande let it be known that it was he who had asked his budget minister to resign last month when a full-scale judicial investigation began into the Swiss bank account affair. This is at odds with the Elysée press release at the time which said that the president had “put an end to Jérôme Cahuzac’s functions, at his request".

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The president then went on to deny any suggestion that he or his office had been aware of Cahuzac's likely guilt, noting he had simply let the judicial process pursue its course of action. This is despite the fact that last week the satirical weekly Le Canard Enchaîné reported that the president had been informed at Christmas – three weeks after Mediapart broke the story – that the allegations were true. The information apparently came from the minister of the interior Manuel Valls whose officials had checked the authenticity of a crucial recording in which Cahuzac spoke of his secret account. “I declare, here, that Jérôme Cahuzac benefited from absolutely no protection other than that of the presumption of innocence,” said the president. “The justice system will pursue its work right to the end and in complete independence.”

Without going into great detail – one of the advantages of a recorded interview is that there are no annoying questions from journalists – the president announced measures he hoped would help achieve the “exemplary” Republic that he talked about creating when he was a candidate for the presidency.

One is a reform aimed at making the judiciary more independent, and which involves changes to the governing body for the judiciary, the Conseil supérieur de la magistrature (CSM). This modest proposal was first announced two weeks ago. President Hollande said this proposal would be voted on “by the summer...to give judges the means to act”.

A second announcement concerned new rules on the personal finances of MPs and ministers and whose aim was to “fight in a relentless manner” against conflicts of interests, with politicians being forced to publish their financial interests. This measure was first discussed two weeks ago during a Cabinet meeting. In any case, Cahuzac himself had signed a declaration swearing “on his honour” about the state of his financial interests when he became a minister last year, as did all other ministers. In hindsight, what value can one attach to these financial declarations?

'I was used' says finance minister

Finally, François Hollande declared that any elected official who was found guilty of tax fraud or corruption would be banned from life from standing again for elected office. The current rule is a three-year ban, and relates only to corruption involving campaign finances. However, the president’s proposal – which goes further than his campaign promise for a ten-year ban – risks being referred to the country's highest constitutional body the Conseil constitutionnel.

The president's TV appearance was praised by the first secretary of the Socialist Party Harlem Désir, who said François Hollande had shown “absolute firmness appropriate to the seriousness of the unacceptable acts and lies of Jérôme Cahuzac”.

However, the opposition claimed that the president had not fully addressed key issues about who knew what about Cahuzac's guilt. The president of the right-wing UMP Jean-François Copé, who described the TV appearance as “too brief”, said the president had not answered the questions that “every French person” is asking. “Was François Hollande aware? Was [prime minister] Jean-Marc Ayrault aware, and if so, since when?” Copé added: “The same goes for a certain number of senior figures in the government.

The last comment was a reference in particular to the finance minister Pierre Moscovici, who on Wednesday came under pressure about his own role in the Cahuzac affair. It was Moscovici who made a request to his counterparts in Switzerland in January about whether Cahuzac had held an account at UBS bank in Geneva. A week later a reply came back which, during a radio interview on 7th February, Moscovici suggested had been in the negative. The Swiss response also prompted some newspaper headlines that Cahuzac had been “cleared” though no journalist had seen the report – even Moscovic said he had only seen a copy of it.

One newspaper, Le Journal du Dimanche, which on 9th February declared that Cahuzac had been cleared of all suspicion by the Swiss, even described how the “minister's entourage” - meaning Moscovici – believed that there was “absolutely no room for doubt” on the matter. Yet according to a judicial source at the time who spoke first to news agency Reuters then French weekly magazine Le Nouvel Observateur, the “Swiss information is open to interpretation”.

During an interview on Europe 1 radio on Wednesday Jean-François Copé urged that the Swiss document be made public. “Moscovici should be asked why in the end he only chose to request [this document from the Swiss].” UMP MP Claude Goasguen went further in calling for the resignation of the finance minister “as soon as possible” because of the “very serious dysfunction” of the ministry of finance over the affair and its dealings with the Swiss authorities.

Jean-Luc Mélenchon, co-president of the radical-left Parti de gauche, also joined in the attack, asking: “How can one say that the minister Moscovici himself knew nothing either [of Cahuzac's guilt], when he is the main minister in [the finance ministry]? Lots of people are going to ask this question...I find it very difficult to believe that no one knew anything.”

Some critics have seen the move by the ministry as an attempt to close down judicial enquiries into the existence of the Swiss bank account. However, Pierre Moscovici himself vehemently denied he had done anything improper. “There was absolutely no complacency, no wish to impede justice,” he said on RTL radio. And interviewed later by Mediapart, the finance minister said : “I was used”. As for the quote in Le Journal du Dimanche, Moscovici insisted that neither he nor anyone in his ministerial office had briefed the newspaper. “I refused to speak to the JDD,” he said. He described the story as being a “public relations exercise staged by I don't know who”.

Meanwhile, according to the Swiss daily newspaper Le Temps, searches of the offices of UBS bank and the financial company Reyl et Cie have located Cahuzac's account with the Swiss bank. “We have found what we were looking for,” an official for the Swiss prosecution authorities told the newspaper.

In another development, it emerged on Wednesday that Cahuzac's account at UBS had been opened in 1992 by a lawyer called Philippe Péninque, who is a close adviser to the president of the far-right Front national party, Marine Le Pen. Péninque told Le Monde that he had done nothing wrong in opening the account for Cahuzac, whom he described as a “friend”. He said: “What is illegal is to not declare an account, not to help open one. Jérôme Cahuzac needed an account and I helped him open it.”

The revelation is likely to cause considerable political embarrassment for Le Pen, who has attacked both the president and the prime minister over the affair. The Front national have been performing well in the opinion polls amid public disenchantment with the mainstream parties of government and opposition. Having been informed by Péninque on Tuesday of the news, Le Pen sought to minimise it by saying that “one of my lawyer friends opened an account abroad for a client 25 years ago. It's a completely innocuous act.”

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For more on Mediapart's exclusive coverage of the Cahuzac affair visit:

The Cahuzac affair: an A-Z of Mediapart's exclusive investigations and analysis