Eyes wide shut to corruption in France

ThereThere is a famous anecdote about boiling a frog. It states that if you plunge the frog straight into scalding water it will leap right out. But if you put the frog in cool water that is slowly heated the frog is numbed and ends up accepting the hot water even though it is a threat to its own life. This approach may be dubious scientifically, but the tale nonetheless provides a powerful lesson. Faced with corruption in France, we are all in the process of becoming frogs.

We could of course carry on pretending not to see it. We could behave as if nothing, or very little, was amiss. And behave as if it was all quite natural, that these “scandals” on the Right, Left and far-right are simply the inevitable convulsions of French public life, financial news stories that might or might not be spectacular, involving people who might or might not be well-known, who sometimes fall and who sometimes get back on their feet. We could tell ourselves that this whole circus is the common lot of any democracy, one that feeds media hysteria at regular intervals. We could also carry on poking fun at others, Italians, Greeks, the Spanish or Africans, to make us feel better about ourselves. We could.

Or, on the other hand, we could tell ourselves that the situation is serious. But genuinely so, as it is very serious. A coincidence of the judicial timetable that saw the opening of the trial of former budget minister Jérôme Cahuzac on tax fraud charges start on the same day that it was revealed prosecutors want Nicolas Sarkozy to stand trial for “illegal financing” of his 2012 presidential campaign, gives us an insight into this serious situation. A very small insight which, on its own, should worry us about the state of public ethics in France. Here on the one hand was a minister (from the Left) in charge of the fight against tax fraud who is a tax fraud – and perhaps also the discreet financier for a socialist fringe group – and on the other a former president of the Republic (from the Right) whose campaign spending for the 2012 election was more than double the legal limit of 22 million euros, an offence masked by false invoicing.

Of course if it was just that … but it does not stop there. One has to take stock of what we at Mediapart have been trying to document for nearly ten years now. Nicolas Sarkozy is himself also under formal investigation for “corruption” and “influence peddling” in another case, in which one finds a former head of state and his lawyer with their “secret” phones acting like the dealers in the US drama series 'The Wire' to plot against judges who had become just a little too nosy.

The former president's name is also cited in half a dozen other major cases: the Bernard Tapie scandal (which has led to the current head of the International Monetary Fund, Christine Lagarde, facing trial), the claims of Libyan funding of his 2007 campaign, alleged kickbacks involving Kazakhstan, the so-called Karachi affair involving arms deals, and alleged favouritism in the commissioning of polls at the Elysée. Now that he sees a chance of being president again in next year's election, Sarkozy uses the slightest judicial inconvenience to launch a Silvio Berlusconi-style attack against a politicised judiciary that apparently wants to bring him down. He has even dared to make a comparison with the old East German security service the Stasi.

It's easy to forget that the former president himself, trapped by his own verbal incontinence, vowed at a political meeting at Vélizay, near Paris, in October 2014 that he had returned to politics because of the legal affairs that surrounded him. “If they wanted me to rest quietly in a corner they shouldn't have done that!” he said, speaking of the investigations that involve him. Therefore it is not because he has returned to politics that the judicial system is attacking him, but it is because it was doing its normal job that, feeling hounded, Sarkozy came back. There's a subtle difference.

Over and above Sarkozy's personal case, more than 30 people close to him are currently under formal investigation – one step short of charges being brought – awaiting trial or have been convicted in cases brought by anti-corruption branches of the judiciary. There is something unprecedented in the almost industrial character of the Sarkozy system that historians will pick over at their leisure in years to come.

Still on the Right one could also cite the case of Patrick and Isabelle Balkany, mayor and deputy mayor respectively of the wealthy suburb of Levallois-Perret on the outskirts of Paris, and who between them have been put under investigation in relation to a number of alleged financial offences. There is also the case of Serge Dassault, head of the eponymous defence and aviation group, and also owner of a media group that includes the right-wing Le Figaro. In a case that involves bank accounts hidden in tax havens and cash payments running to several tens of millions of euros, Dassault stuck two fingers up to the justice system by declining to appear at his own trial. He believed it was possible and he was proved right. And the 91-year-old was rewarded for his impudence when the court decided to suspend proceedings and ask for new investigations to be carried out. That was just a few days ago. Time is on his side. But what other alleged criminal has the right to such treatment?

The Left, which does not by its nature have a monopoly on public morals, has not been spared either. The Cahuzac affair has lastingly tarnished President François Hollande's five-year term. Other affairs, too, have weakened the “exemplary Republic” that the current head of state had said he would preside over. These include the cases involving former minister Kader Arif, that of the presidential advisor Faouzi Lamdaoui, the conflicts of interest of Aquilino Morelle and the “administrative phobia” of minister Thomas Thévenoud who was late with his tax declarations. To this one can add the Guérini affair, involving left-wing senator Jean-Noël Guérini, which according to a report by customs officials has a whiff of 'Mafia' about it, and that of the socialist MP Sylvie Andrieux from the Bouches-du-Rhône in southern France, convicted of embezzling public money.

In such a situation one would think that one party, which historically makes capital out of others' weaknesses, would be able to rub its hands in glee: the far-right Front National (FN). This, after all, is a demonstration of their long-standing claim that all the mainstream parties are “rotten” and that the main right-wing and left-wing parties have jointly failed the nation. Yet the FN and some of its representatives would do better to keep a low profile. Today they, too, are targeted by several very embarrassing financial cases. Naturally enough the party claims that the legal system is acting in a politically-motivated way. Claiming judicial plots is a classic ploy, a very convenient way of not having to respond publicly to the facts themselves.

It really is a little discouraging. Ever since Cicero we have known that there will be the corrupt and corrupters. It is not about changing human nature but finding the right ecosystem (political, judicial, citizen, administrative) that allows us to prevent corruption to the best of our abilities and to punish it mercilessly when it is discovered. Instead, listening to certain French politicians one sometimes has the impression of jumping back several centuries intellectually and returning to 1639 when Gabriel Naudé, a theoretician on statecraft, stated in his work 'Considérations politiques sur les coups d’État' ('Political Reflections on Coups d'État') that: “He who doesn't know how to dissemble doesn't know how to rule”. Or when Cardinal Mazarin, the 17th century advisor to the French monarchy, in his work 'Bréviaire des Politiciens' ('The Politicians' Breviary'), gave this advice to sovereigns: “1. Simulate. 2. Dissimulate.”

However, a few enlightened minds – Immanuel Kant, Alexis de Tocqueville, Jeremy Bentham, Benjamin Constant, Hannah Arendt and so on – have given us the weapons to counter those who want obscurity for the citizens and, along the way, wealth for the rulers. Yet in this era such words of good sense can be seen as unacceptable appeals to the dictatorship of transparency.

The enrichment of an individual and the impoverishment of all

There have, of course, been some advances in recent years in the fight against corruption and tax fraud in France. For example, the Cahuzac affair itself had some notable consequences: the creation of a specialist fraud prosecution unit – even if it and all the anti-corruption judicial branches suffer from a lack of resources – and the establishment of a High Authority for Transparency in Public Life (HATVP). This latter body's role is to monitor the financial declarations of elected officials. That is a good thing. But it is no reason for us to be ecstatic either. After all, trying to put in place the means to make sure that elected officials do not take advantage of their public position to enrich themselves privately is the strict minimum one would expect in any democracy. Comparisons are odious, but when one moves from prehistoric times to the Middle Ages one has made progress. But is it yet enough? No.

There is so much that remains undone. The Cour de Justice de la République (CJR), the only court that can try ministers for offences committed in the course of their government duties, has still not been abolished. The anomaly under which the French Treasury is the only authority which can initiate criminal proceedings for tax fraud has still not been removed. The system for declassifying defence secrets, which has sometimes allowed affairs involving embezzlement to be buried because the government always has the final word over the judiciary, has still not been modified. The formal and statutory independence of investigating authorities, chief among them prosecutors, has not been decreed. They are still subject to a hierarchy which, at the top of the chain, stops with the minister.

When so much of the spirit of the Republic's independence is left to depend on individuals and not the institutions themselves, one cannot later complain when everyone sees the hand of the opposing political camp behind their own judicial woes. Thus on Monday Sarkozy's lawyer Thierry Herzog was quick to attack what he claimed was the “crude political manoeuvring” behind the 2012 election funding affair. It is dramatic but inevitable. And sometimes it can even be true.

In France the fight against corruption is seen, from a political point of view, only about reacting to events. Over the last thirty years the 15 or so laws and decrees which have sought to clean up public life have been voted in after a scandal has broken. It is as if, spurred on by public emotion, the different governments had said to themselves that they had to act hastily to calm the passions of these good citizens who have had enough. The fight against corruption is never (or only very rarely) at the heart of a presidential manifesto from a so-called party of government. The 2017 presidential election is unlikely to change matters. Yet fighting against corruption is as important as fighting against unemployment or public deficits. It's sometimes even linked.

It is no accident that in its 2003 convention on the issue the United Nations wrote of the threats posed by corruption to “the stability and security of societies, undermining the institutions and values of democracy, ethical values and justice and jeopardizing sustainable development and the rule of law”. The consequences of corruption are terrible and the toll always a heavy one. Symbolically, it causes the mistrust of citizens towards democracy to continue to grow. Financially we are all the victims of invisible corruption, of tax fraud and of their consequences.

A single figure tells its own story: the most reliable estimates from the pressure group Tax Justice Network in 2012 put the total sum of money stashed in offshore tax havens at around 26,000 billion US dollars (that is to say, 26 trillion dollars). That is more than the gross domestic product of the United States and Japan combined. It is therefore a problem that is not on the margins of the global economy but right at its heart. All this money has escaped from the wealth of nations, from hospitals, crèches and schools. The people who pay do so for those who do not pay. It is as simple as that.
On top of financial and democratic concerns, the consequences of corruption can also be devastating in other areas. Health is one area, for example when dirty money has enabled pharmaceutical firms to get a medicine authorised for use on the market and whose cost is reimbursed by social security, only for it to turn out that medicine is of no use or, worse, that it was dangerous. This both artificiality increases the financial black hole of the social security system and affects people's lives. Then there are arms sales: when bribes are used to enable France to win a contract with an autocratic country (Saudi Arabia for example), what might be the diplomatic consequences of the shameful links that tie that country to France?

After the breaking of the Panama Papers scandal and the discovery that their prime minister Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson was implicated, thousands of Icelanders took to the streets to show their anger. Up to 10% of the population may have taken part in these protests. The people of Iceland understood that each citizen is personally a victim of the corruption or fraud of one of its leaders. The enrichment of a single individual automatically means the impoverishment of all.

When corruption trials in France do occur they often take place ten or fifteen years after the event. The Italian jurist and philosopher Cesare Beccaria wrote in his treatise 'On Crimes and Punishments': “An immediate punishment is more useful; because the smaller the interval of time between the punishment and the crime, the stronger and more lasting will be the association of the two ideas of Crime and Punishment...” That was in 1764. Who can understand the lessons provided by a punishment delivered decades after the facts? For example, if one day there were to be a trial involving the financial aspects of the Karachi affair, it would take place more than 20 years after the misappropriations of funds that took place in relation to arms sales by the government of prime minister Édouard Balladur.

And at the end of the day, what punishments will ultimately be handed down? In this regard there is a great French taboo: actual jail time. It is not desirable for anyone. But if one considers that corruption or tax fraud are indeed concerted attacks against the idea of an organised society, then it does not seem extreme that the punishment of some of those convicted should take place behind bars. This is what happens in many other countries: in Britain an MP and former government minister who had cheated over his expenses was jailed for three months; in the United States a former governor of Illinois was jailed for 14 years over corruption; in Germany a former president of Bayern Munich football club was jailed for three years for tax evasion; in Israel a former prime minister is still in jail after being sentenced to 19 months imprisonment over bribery charges.

France is often reluctant to go down this route, and that has consequences. In 1847, when France's July Monarchy was rocked by a major corruption scandal – known as the Teste-Cubières affair – Victor Hugo wrote: “When the crowd looks with these eyes upon the rich, it is not ideas which occupy every mind, it is events.”

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

• The French version of this article can be found here.

English version by Michael Streeter