French budget minister Jérôme Cahuzac, who last month announced his ministry was launching a crackdown on tax fraud, held for several years a secret bank account in Switzerland that was hidden from the French tax authorities, Mediapart can reveal following a lengthy investigation that discovered concording evidence from individual sources and official documents.
Cahuzac, 60, closed the account with a Geneva branch of the Union des Banques Suisses bank (UBS), in 2010, shortly before he was appointed as president of the finance commission of the lower house of the French parliament, the National Assembly. According to sources informed of the operation, funds held in the account were then transferred to Singapore.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
Questioned by Mediapart, Cahuzac denied ever holding an account in Switzerland, while threatening legal action if the suggestion that he had was published.
Cahuzac, who is also a plastic surgeon specialized in hair transplant operations, was in May appointed as budget minister in the new socialist government that came to power after the election of President François Hollande.
Until then, he served as a socialist Member of Parliament for a constituency in the Lot-et-Garonne département (county) of south-west France, where he was also, from 2001 to 2012, mayor of the small town of Villeneuve-sur-Lot.
Between 1988 and 1991, Cahuzac served as an advisor to the then socialist health minister Claude Evin, during which time he developed close relations with the French pharmaceutical industry.
Suspicion over the existence of Cahuzac’s secret Swiss account was the subject of an internal report prepared in June 2008 by tax inspector Rémy Garnier, who was based with a regional tax office in south-west France. At the time, the French budget minister, under Nicolas Sarkozy’s conservative government, was Eric Woerth, who is currently placed under formal investigation in a judicial probe for his role in suspected illegal political funding of Sarkozy’s 2007 election campaign and for influence peddling.
Now retired, Garnier was subsequently reprimanded by his departmental managers, to whom the report was addressed, for having consulted Cahuzac’s tax details without proper justification. He did so by entering an internal tax authority computer programme called Adonis.
Garnier contested the reprimand, and took his case to the Bordeaux administrative tribunal. In a document he prepared for the hearing, dated June 11th 2008 and which is currently held by the tribunal in an archived dossier code-numbered as 0 901 621-5, Garnier wrote that he decided to search Cahuzac’s tax details after information was provided to him “by several sources outside the fiscal administration” and which “converged upon the same conclusions”. These were, he wrote, that “while exercising his functions with the cabinet of Minister of Health Claude Evin, [Cahuzac] opens a numbered bank account in Switzerland.” Garnier did not name the bank concerned.
Garnier also noted that his search of Cahuzac’s tax returns “allowed neither the validation nor invalidation of the information”, and as a result he called for “a deeper examination” of Cahuzac’s personal tax situation.
However, Mediapart has now established that Cahuzac held an account with UBS in Geneva.
Garnier’s request for a more detailed investigation was ignored, and he was served a formal warning over his unauthorised consultation of Cahuzac’s tax details. Garnier challenged the disciplinary procedure before the Bordeaux administrative tribunal in 2009, when he lost the case. He has since lodged an appeal, which is yet to be heard.
Contacted by Mediapart, Garnier declined to offer any comment on the events.
Cahuzac cites Eric Woerth as testimony to his honesty
Mediapart contacted Cahuzac by email on Monday December 3rd with a list of questions concerning the account in Switzerland, and the budget minister accepted an interview that was recorded in his offices on December 4th.
“I don’t have an account in Switzerland and I never had one,” Cahuzac told Mediapart. “It is clear that if you publish that, I will attack. I am a public figure. I believe that I have shown that I was not hanging behind when I was president of the finance commission. It is the least to say that I put a sword in the side of the fiscal administration so that a number of dossiers were released.”
“Eric Woerth, who I questioned [after being contacted by Mediapart], told me, eye to eye, that he had never had the slightest document concerning me, and that if he had, obviously, he would have allowed the procedure to follow its course,” the minister added.
Enlargement : Illustration 2
According to information provided to Mediapart, during his campaign for election as mayor of Villeneuve-sur-Lot in 2000, Cahuzac spoke of his concerns about his Swiss bank account in a conversation with one of his campaign managers. During the conversation, the existence of which can be partly traced, Cahuzac allegedly said: “What bothers me is that I’ve still got an account open with UBS. It pisses me off to have an account open there. UBS is not necessarily the most hidden of banks.”
Mediapart has learnt that the account with UBS was formally closed by Cahuzac early in 2010, just days before he was elected to the presidency of the financial affairs commission of the National Assembly. Asked by Mediapart whether he travelled to Geneva in 2010, Cahuzac replied: “No more so than to Turin, Milan or New York.”
According to Mediapart’s sources, the funds hidden in the account were then transferred to another UBS branch in Singapore, via a complex offshore financial structure.
In his 2008 report, tax inspector Rémy Garnier wrote that Cahuzac “acquired his Parisian apartment situated on the avenue de Breteuil for the sum of six and a half million francs, four million financed, at the start of [his] career, in cash, the origins of which remain dubious”.
While there is no evidence that the four million francs came from a Swiss bank account, Cahuzac has falsely claimed, notably in an interview with a regional newspaper in south-west France, La Gazette de la Vallée du Lot, that two thirds of the purchase price of his apartment was financed by a bank loan.
According to the notarial deed for the purchase of the property – a four-bedroom apartment in the French capital’s upmarket 7th arrondissement – dated October 28th 1994, Cahuzac, who was then aged 42, provided four million francs (equivalent to 600,000 euros) “from his personal finances”, while one third of the total price was provided by a bank loan.
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See also:
List of Greek accounts in Switzerland 'just the tip of the iceberg'
Fighting the organised crime of tax evasion
The Belgian tax drain sucking French rich north
How the Bettencourt affair led Sarkozy before the judge
Judge links L'Oréal heiress cash withdrawals to Sarkozy campaign funding
Sarkozy campaign treasurer under investigation for illegal funding, influence peddling
L'Oréal heiress ordered to pay 77.7 million euros after tax scam probe
French prosecutor in Bettencourt affair illegally spied journalists' phone calls
Dinners, cash and Sarkozy: what Bettencourt's accountant told Mediapart
Bettencourt butler bites back: 'I saw L'Oréal family destroyed'
Bettencourt tapes stolen in mystery break-ins targetting Mediapart, Le Point and Le Monde
French interior minister drops libel action against Mediapart
Why we need a strong media in France
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English version: Graham Tearse