Earlier this summer staff unions at Air France revealed how Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, the former model-turned-singer and wife of former French president Nicolas Sarkozy, heiress of a considerable family fortune, had been given free travel by the airline for a return first-class trip to New York in June to promote her latest album.
Bruni-Sarkozy, 45, was entitled to the perk, estimated to have cost the airline between 10,000 euros and 15,000 euros, under a 1985 decree signed by then-socialist prime minister Laurent Fabius that allows former presidents and their families “transport facilities” on the partly state-owned airline. Since 1938, they also enjoy free travel on the national railways
But however legal, the freebie further highlighted the gravy-train existence of France’s political elite and caused outrage among the airline’s employees at a time when they face further job reductions as part of a massive cost-cutting plan.
Now Bruni-Sarkozy is caught up in a new and developing controversy over her use of public money, this time involving state funding of her website when she was ‘First Lady’ of France during Sarkozy’s period in office.
It began with the publication of a report on July 15th by the French national audit office, the Cours des Comptes (Court of Accounts), into spending in 2012 by the French presidential office, the Elysée Palace. The year began under the presidency of Sarkozy, who was replaced by his socialist rival François Hollande in elections in May 2012.
The Court of Accounts noted that under Hollande, during the period May 15th to December 31st, the Elysée’s lavish outlay was reined in to the tune of 6 million euros, bringing the yearly budget of the executive office down to 102.9 million euros from a previous 108.9 million euros.
Among the principle areas where savings were made, the report outlined, was transport of the president and his staff (with a greater use of trains instead of planes), a 30% pay cut for the president (which Hollande instituted shortly after taking up office, and who now earns 13,764 euros net per month), a reduction in staff and the introduction of a more modest plan of refurbishment of the buildings, spending on flowers (down 100,000 euros on 2011 to total 130,000 euros in 2012) and an end to the contentious ordering of public opinion polls, which in the first five months of the year under Sarkozy amounted to more than 77,000 euros.
But another target of the spending cuts under Hollande, reported the Court of Accounts, was the Elysée’s spending on its PR budget and notably its internet activities. “Between January 1st and May 15th,” revealed the report, reffering to the five and a half months of 2012 under the Sarkozy presidency, “the Elysée spent 373,809 euros on its internet department. Over the following six months, under François Hollande, spending was strongly reduced, bringing it down to 180,000 euros. Among the savings made was the closure of the First Lady’s website.”
Enlargement : Illustration 1
The significance of that last sentence was initially picked up by French political affairs website politique.net which, in an article published on July 18th, calculated that the website dedicated to Carla-Bruni Sarkozy had cost the taxpayer 410,000 euros over the 18-month period from January 1st 2011. On July 23rd, as the controversy developed into a loud internet buzz, a Paris-based website developer specialized in internet video games production, Nicolas Bousquet, launched a petition to demand that Bruni-Sarkozy refund the 410,000 euros in the form of a donation to worthy charities. Little more than a week later, the petition has now attracted more than 100,000 signatures.
Enlargement : Illustration 2
At the heart of the controversy is the fact that the site, created in 2009, was the subject of no overhaul of its structure since 2010, which translates financially into a maintenance cost of 25,000 euros per month.
The sum was described as “mindblowing” by Olivier Laurelli, a specialist in web technology and co-founder of the news and current affairs website Reflets.info who reported on his detailed study of Bruni-Sarkozy’s site (www.carlabrunisarkozy.org) in a lengthy post on his blog . “At that price, one naturally expects something truly amazing, an irreproachable quality of coding, a sumptuous design, a horde of Chinese hackers who change the site every hour,” he wrote. But what Laurelli found was a rudimentary CMS Wordpress system, “a veritable festival of vulnerability” in terms of the site’s security, disappointing graphics, and a “project management that oozes incompetence”. He concluded that the site was “a delusion of grandeur” and “a finger pointed up high towards the taxpayer” who, he said, had been “defrauded”.
Bruni-Sarkozy has threatened legal action over the petition for her to repay the website budget. Her lawyer, Richard Malka, announced that she “reserves the right” to launch a lawsuit against “any statement that damages her honour, as of the moment it is suggested that the Foundation that carries her name benefitted from financing that never existed”, adding that her charitable foundation did not receive “a single cent” of the money in question.
Contacted by French daily Le Figaro, the Fondation Carla Bruni-Sarkozy said the site paid for by the Elysée, carlabrunisarkozy.org, redirected visitors towards three other sites. One was that of her foundation, another was a series of pages dedicated to her activities as First Lady and the other concerned her humanitarian work in campaigning against the proliferation of Aids. The latter two, noted the foundation, no longer existed.
Enlargement : Illustration 3
The foundation subsequently published a “rectification” on its site, in which it explained that “all the content visible on this site has been entirely paid for by the Foundation” and that “It was in no circumstance financed by the state or any other entity outside the Foundation, and this [is the case] since the creation of the site”.
That statement implies that the 410,000 euros that were allocated to her site between January 2011 and May 2012 concerned only the pages concerning her activities as First Lady. A blogger who writes under the name of GeekMan subsequently went looking, via web.archive.org, for the pages no longer accessible and discovered that, over the year 2012, just seven articles existed referring to her activities as First Lady, along with several photos. According to Laurelli, these short texts appear above all as intended for posts on Twitter. According to the figures published by the Court of Accounts these cost the taxpayer 80,000 euros.
In May this year, the prime minister’s office, answering a question tabled by a Member of Parliament from the conservative UMP opposition party, revealed that two external website service providers looked after the management of Bruni-Sarkozy’s site for a combined total net cost of 25, 714 euros. Contacted by Mediapart, both the prime minister’s office and the presidential office declined to reveal the identities of the two parties involved.
The question, tabled by MP Guillaume Larrivé, in fact centred on the cost of staff employed by the Elysée for the services of President Hollande’s companion, Valérie Trierweiler. In its reply, the prime minister’s office indicated that these amounted two temporary staff and three public employees who together cost a net monthly sum of 19, 742 euros. It compared this with the eight staff previously employed for Bruni-Sarkozy as First Lady, and who cost a monthly net sum of 36,448 euros.
Meanwhile, in January 2012 Mediapart revealed how the the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria contributed 132,756 euros to finance those pages published on Bruni-Sarkozy’s foundation website that were dedicated to raising awareness about Aids. Here also, the sum appears surprisingly costly given the volume of content in question that appears on the website of the foundation - whose mission is to combat illiteracy.
The company that received the financing, La Fabrique du Net, was run by Jérôme Blouin, a close relation of Julien Civange who is a longstanding friend of Bruni-Sarkozy’s who served at the Elysée as one of her advisors. At the time, surprisingly, La Fabrique du Net had no website of its own. It now has a show page but which carries no details of the company’s address or phone numbers.
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English version by Graham Tearse