The affair involving French budget minister Jérôme Cahuzac and his undisclosed Swiss bank account is being investigated by the prosecution authorities, Mediapart can reveal.
Mediapart has learnt from several sources that the authorities in Paris have opened a preliminary inquiry into alleged 'laundering of the proceeds of tax fraud'. The investigation is being carried out by the national financial and tax investigation unit the Division nationale d’investigations financières et fiscales (Dniff), based at Nanterre on the western outskirts of Paris.
Contacted by Mediapart on January 8th a spokesman for the prosecution authorities initially declined to confirm or deny the story, but then issued a press statement (read in French here) confirming the probe.
The opening of the investigation, which will increase both the legal and political pressure on Cahuzac, comes one month after Mediapart's initial revelations about the minister's former Swiss bank account.
It was opened with UBS bank in Geneva in the early 1990s, not disclosed to the French tax authorities, and officially closed at the beginning of 2010. According to Mediapart's information Cahuzac, then simply a Member of Parliament, transferred remaining assets from Switzerland to an account in Singapore.
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Cahuzac has publicly denied ever holding a Swiss bank account and began defamation proceedings against Mediapart over the story. For some weeks this was the only legal or judicial inquiry taking place over the investigation.
However on December 29th Mediapart's editor-in-chief Edwy Plenel wrote a letter to the prosecution authorities in Paris (read the letter here in French ) requesting that they open an investigation based on the facts revealed by Mediapart.
Though Cahuzac has repeatedly denied the allegations – he did so again in a string of media appearances last weekend – he has refused to respond in detail to key unanswered questions that have arisen over the affair. His defence has been incoherent and at times he has lied over both small and large matters concerning the allegations.
In an accidentally-recorded conversation that took place in late 2000, Cahuzac can be heard discussing his Swiss bank account and his embarrassment at still having it. On the tape Cahuzac is heard saying: “What bothers me is that I still have an account open with UBS, but there’s nothing more there, no? The only way to close it is to go there?”
He later adds: “It pisses me off to have an account open there. UBS is not necessarily the most hidden of banks.”
The person who held the tape was Michel Gonelle, a barrister and former centre-right UMP mayor of Villeneuve-sur-Lot in south-west France, and an old political rival of Cahuzac. On December 15th last year Gonelle contacted the office of the President of the Republic François Hollande to formally vouch for its authenticity.
The barrister says that in 2007 he had also passed the tape to the anti-terrorist investigating magistrate Jean-Louis Bruguière, a fact confirmed by the judge. However, somewhat surprisingly the judge said he had not listened to the tape and had destroyed his copy of it.
It was not until two weeks after Mediapart broke the story about the tape's existence and content that Cahuzac denied that it was his voice on the tape. As part of his evidence for this he said his brother Antoine Cahuzac, a banker, had confirmed it was not his voice.
Yet in emails seen by Mediapart and which were sent between Cahuzac and an old friend, the minister did not deny being on the recording. When this friend asked Cahuzac if it was a “set-up”, the minister replied: “Or a bad joke taken out of context”.
Mysterious trip to Geneva
In addition, Jérôme Cahuzac has changed his story about the trip he made to Geneva in early 2010 that the Mediapart investigation said was to close his UBS account. Having first denied going to Geneva, the minister later stated on RTL radio that he did indeed visit the city at about that time, but said this was on parliamentary business and that the trip was arranged through the National Assembly travel service.
Since then the minister has not been in a position to make public the ticket ordered through the National Assembly travel service any more than he has pinpointed the precise date of his trip
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Cahuzac has said the purpose of that trip was to meet “informants, who were sending me information of a tax nature and which seemed to me more or less serious enough to see what it was about”. He has yet to say if this was part of a formal National Assembly mission, if officials accompanied him or if any records of the trip exist.
Though publicly Jérôme Cahuzac has insisted he remains very calm since the affair broke, information received by Mediapart shows that, on the contrary, several branches of the state have been pressed into service to trace Mediapart's sources. So, for example, on December 11th the budget minister's chief of staff Marie-Helène Valente said that she had been informed by sources from the country's prefecture - which is under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of the Interior – about a telephone conversation between Edwy Plenel, Mediapart's Editor-in-Chief, and a - real or alleged – source of the media outlet.
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The chief of staff said she was waiting for “a copy of the official report” from the police. And she added that one had to be “cautious with received information ”.
When contacted by Mediapart Marie-Helène Valente simply said that she had a “normal relationship with the services of the Ministry of the Interior”, refusing to confirm or deny our information.
Mediapart has also been able to get confirmation that, contrary to what the minister's “entourage” claimed in the Journal du Dimanche on December 16th, the minister's wealth manager Hervé Dreyfus, to whom Cahuzac was speaking in the recorded conversation, was never a customer at his hair transplant clinic. He was in charge of managing Cahuzac's assets – especially hidden ones.
The pair were introduced by Cahuzac's brother Antoine in the early 1990s.
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English version by Michael Streeter