The prosecution authorities have said there is no case to answer against one of President Nicolas Sarkozy's former ministers who was suspected of “influence peddling” in relation to the Bettencourt affair.
Eric Woerth, the former budget and labour minister in Sarkozy's government, had been placed under investigation over claims he procured L'Oréal heiress Liliane Bettencourt's wealth manager an honour in return for employing his wife. Two months after wealth manager Patrice de Maistre hired Florence Woerth as an investment advisor for Bettencourt on a yearly salary of 200,000 euros, Woerth decorated Maistre with the Légion d’honneur, France’s highest award for civil merit.
Magistrates investigating the Bettencourt affair – in which there are several different lines of inquiry – put Woerth under formal investigation in February 2012 for passive “influence peddling” in relation to the allegations, which he has always denied. Maistre, who ran the company Clymène that employed Florence Woerth, was also put under investigation for “active” influence peddling.
However, on Friday May 10th Claude Laplaud, the chief prosecutor in Bordeaux, south-west France, from where the investigation is being run, said that they considered that there was no case to answer against either Woerth, who is still an MP, or Maistre in relation to these charges. “The prosecution considers than the correlation between the two facts [the award and the hiring of Florence Woerth] – a necessary condition in determining the crime - has not formally been demonstrated,” Laplaud said in a statement.
The prosecutor also referred to allegations of illegal funding of Sarkozy's 2007 election campaign, in which it was said that large cash payments from the Bettencourts made their way into the campaign coffers. Woerth was Sarkozy's campaign treasurer and there have been claims that it was Maistre who handed over some of that cash directly to Woerth.
However, in his statement prosecutor Laplaud noted that neither Woerth nor Maistre had been placed under formal investigation for “illegal financing of electoral campaigns and political parties”, and that the crimes were “by no means clearly demonstrated” by the investigation. In any case, even had there been such evidence, the prosecutor added, they would have been protected by the statute of limitations from prosecution for an offence that took place back in 2007.
'Work of fiction'
The opinion given by the authorities in Bordeaux will come as no great surprise to close observers of the Bettencourt investigations, as from the beginning the prosecution there has been very cautious in its handling of the affair.
In any case, the prosecutor's formal statement that Woerth and Maistre have no case to answer does not end the matter. The case will now be referred back to the three investigating magistrates, Jean-Michel Gentil, Cécile Ramonatxo and Valérie Noël, who carried out the investigation. They can decide to either accept the prosecutor's view or discount it and send the two men to appear before a criminal court.
After the prosecutor's opinion was made public, Eric Woerth's lawyer Jean-Yves Le Borgne said he was “satisfied” with the statement, adding that he was “not surprised”. For him, the placing of his client under investigation had been a “work of fiction”.
Maistre is also under investigation for other alleged offences linked to the Bettencourt affair, including misuse of company funds and “abuse of weakness” in relation to the elderly Liliane Bettencourt. A medical examination ordered by magistrates in June 2011 found that she was suffering from “mixed dementia” and “a moderately severe stage [sic] of Alzheimer’s disease”.
The claim that he abused Liliane Bettencourt's mental frailty is also the allegation which led to former president Nicolas Sarkozy being put under investigation in March, a move that was strongly denounced by many of his fellow conservatives. Sarkozy's lawyers are now trying to get the judges' decision annulled.
The former president is claimed by witnesses to have visited the Bettencourt home on more than one occasion during the 2007 presidential campaign and to have collected campaign donations in cash. Sarkozy claims he visited the home only once, on February 24th, and denies taking money.
There have been press reports – since denied - that the Bordeaux prosecution authorities have already decided to recommend that the former president has no case to answer over the 'abuse' allegations.
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English version by Michael Streeter