The trial in Paris of five members of former French president Nicolas Sarkozy’s entourage charged with “misappropriation of public funds” and “conspiracy” ended this week with a bruising summing up by the prosecution against former interior minister Claude Guéant and the former director general of France's national police force, Michel Gaudin.
They and the three other defendants, Daniel Canepa, Michel Camux and Gérard Moisselin, were answering charges that they received cash from a French police fund reserved for investigation and surveillance expenses, or frais d’enquête et de surveillance (FES). The fund is dedicated to paying informers and the purchase of equipment or services for a police investigation.
The five defendants are all prefects, a senior French administrative status.
The charges centre on cash received by Guéant from the FES police fund between 2002 and 2004, when he was chief of staff to then-interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy. At the time, Canepa, Camux and Moisselin were members of Sarkozy’s ministerial staff, serving under Guéant.
Daniel Canepa was deputy chief of staff for Sarkozy from 2002 to 2003, and became prefect for the greater Paris region, the Île-de-France, from 2008 to 2012. Michel Camux was head of Sarkozy's private office from 2002 to 2004 while Gérard Moisselin was deputy chief of staff at the same office from 2003 to 2004.
Guéant, who was instrumental in the appointment of Gaudin as head of the French police in 2002, requested and received from Gaudin a secret monthly payment of 10,000 euros from the FES fund. Half of this he distributed to Canepa, Camux and Moisselin, while he kept the remainder for himself. None of the cash sums were declared by the defendants in their tax returns.
Guéant served as Sarkozy's chief of staff throught the latter's ministerial career from 2002 until he became president in 2007. Immediately after his election, Sarkozy made Guéant his presidential chief of staff, and in 2011 appointed him as interior minister.
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Guéant, 70, has not denied receiving the money from the FES fund, but curiously claimed during the trial that he had used part of the sums helping with police investigations, notably the hunt for a fugitive Corsican nationalist wanted for the murder of Corsica’s prefect Claude Erignac in 1998.
In his summing up on Wednesday, Patrice Amar, one of the two public prosecutors leading the case, said that Guéant had played “the leading role” in the scam, and was “the driver” of the scheme who “alone decided to draw from these funds, and he oversaw the distribution”.
“I don’t believe that he has told the truth,” Amar added. “Did Claude Guéant have police missions?” he asked. “For me, his request [for the cash payments from Gaudin] is of a remunerative nature, and Michel Gaudin was aware of the true end purpose for these funds.”
The prosecutor argued that Gaudin “was in no way at the origin of this initiative” but that the former police chief, who is now chief of staff of Sarkozy’s personal team of political advisors and aides, was “guilty by weakness”.
“Virtue,” said Amar, “is to know how to say ‘no’ to orders.”
Amar reminded the court that the maximum sentence for the charges that Guéant faced was ten years in prison, before demanding that the presiding magistrates (who will deliver their sentence in November) pronounce against him a 30-month suspended prison sentence and a 75,000-euro fine, and also a five-year suspension of his rights to vote or stand for public election. He called for Gaudin, who was the only one of the defendants who is not accused of receiving cash payments from the fund, to be given a 10-month suspended prison sentence.
Amar’s summing up was followed by that of his colleague Ulrika Delaunay-Weiss. She told the court that police evidence showed that Guéant had spent half of the 105,000 euros he paid himself on “crockery, house furnishings and antiquities”. Concerning the curious claim by Guéant that he had used the cash to hunt down criminals, she said: “In what capacity? I ask myself if we have a sufficient number of police in France for minister’s chief of staff, so busy, to have to take leave of his duties.”
She said that Guéant could have chosen to raise a monthly bonus for expenses paid to himself and other members of the ministry (between 2,000 euros and 3,000 euros) instead of “shovelling into the expenses for investigations and surveillance”. She underlined the financial difficulties of the French police, and notably those of “the heads of operational services who have insufficient means”, while also detailing the poor salaries and bonuses paid to officers.
Delaunay-Weiss reminded the five prefects that there was a difference between “serving, and serving oneself”.
She called for Canepa, Camux and Moisselin to be fined by the same amount as that they received in the cash payouts, respectively 21,000 euros, 42,000 euros and 18,000 euros.
Earlier on Wednesday, a legal representative of the French state demanded that the five defendants jointly “repay the embezzled sums”, which represent a total of 210,000 euros. The tax authorities, meanwhile, have already demanded from the four who received the money -Guéant, Canepa, Camux and Moisselin – payment on the undeclared income.
The lawyers for the five accused all requested that the charges be dismissed and argued that there was a lack of legal clarity over the 1926 decree which first established the FES fund. One of Guéant’s two lawyers, Jean-Yves Dupeux, insisted on Guéant’s long career as a prefect, as secretary general of the presidential office, the Elysée Palace, and his term as interior minister.
Guéant was the only defendant to take up the right to comment at the end of the trial. He said he was “appalled and profoundly hurt” by the public prosecutors’ remarks. “Serving myself instead of serving?” he asked. “It’s the complete opposite of what has been my life”.
The presiding magistrates will deliver their verdict on November 13th.
A system of slush funds was once rampant across French ministries, whereby bonuses were allocated by ministers to their close aides, paid out of a state fund set up specifically for the purpose. The existence of the cash bonuses were largely ignored by the public and officially ignored by the tax authorities.
However, the practice was partially reformed in December 2001 by then socialist prime minister Lionel Jospin, who ordered that any bonuses given to top civil servants on top of their regular salaries should be taxable and paid by traceable bank transfer.
In a report published on March 4th 2014, the French national audit body, the Court of Accounts (la Cour des comptes), detailed the findings of its own investigation into the opaque FES fund (see here, available in French only). The auditors established that between 2002 and 2012 a total of 34 million euros were managed by the office of the French national police force director-general. In their introduction to the report, the auditors underlined that while payments from the FES fund were destined to be used for operational expenses by police officers, “in the event they allowed to cover spending of various nature, in questionable budgetary and bookkeeping conditions”.
The Court of Accounts audit report did not detail who, during the period in question, received payments from the funds, nor on what basis the cash was handed out. But it reported that the use of the 34 million euros was “totally discretionary” and that “no accounts record was kept until 2011”.
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The French version of this report can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse