Former French interior minister Claude Guéant and Michel Gaudin, former director-general of France's national police force between 2002 and 2007, are to be sent for trial for the misappropriation of interior ministry funds, Guéant's lawyer has told Mediapart.
Guéant stands accused of unduly receiving between 240,000 and 288,000 euros from funds destined for police activity while he was chief-of-staff to Nicolas Sarkozy when the latter was interior minister between 2002 and 2004. He faces charges of aiding and abetting, and receiving the proceeds of fraud. Gaudin faces a charge of misappropriation of public funds.
Guéant, 70, is a longstanding key aide and close political ally of Sarkozy’s, having served as his ministerial chief-of-staff throughout the period 2002-2007 (when Sarkozy was also finance minister, from 2004-2005, before returning as interior minister from 2005-2007).
After Sarkozy’s election as president in 2007, Guéant, a former prefect, was again appointed as his chief-of-staff, at the Elysée Palace, before he was himself appointed as interior minister by Sarkozy in 2011.
Since Sarkozy’s election defeat by François Hollande in 2012, Gaudin, 66, also a former prefect, has served as chief-of-staff of the former president’s personal team of political advisors and aides. That team is publicly-funded - part of the perks given to all former French presidents - and operates in parallel to Sarkozy’s position, since November 2014, as head of the opposition conservative UMP party.
Guéant’s lawyer Philippe Bouchez-el-Ghozi said he had been told by the financial crimes section of the public prosecutor’s office, the parquet national financier (PNF), on Monday, May 11th, that a trial could take place at the end of September or beginning of October.
“We were presented with the file of a preliminary investigation at the beginning of April, to request our written observations, but the magistrates’ decision was already taken, and a project for a direct committal procedure was already prepared,” said Bouchez-el-Ghozi. “It was not really an adversarial procedure.”
The lawyer said he intended contesting the prosecution case, notably citing the statute of limitations (which fixes a time limit for the prosecution of past events), and the opportunity to amount a fair defence.
Contacted by Mediapart, the public prosecutor’s office said no decision had yet been taken. In a carefully-worded statement issued later on Tuesday, May 12th, it insisted “no decision on prosecution has been formalised and/or notified to the parties or their lawyers”.
In June 2013, an official internal enquiry ordered by then interior minister Manuel Valls, now prime minister, found that Guéant received a secret monthly tax-free bonus of 10,000 euros paid in cash between the summer of 2002 and up to the summer of 2004 while he served as chief-of-staff to Sarkozy. The enquiry was carried out by the public administration inspectorate, the IGA, and the national police inspectorate, the IPGN.
Valls passed on the findings to the public prosecutor’s office, which immediately, on June 14th 2013, launched a preliminary judicial investigation into suspected “misuse of public funds and receiving”. Both Guéant and Gaudin were arrested and held for questioning on December 17th 2013.
The cash came from a French police fund for ‘investigation and surveillance expenses’, or frais d’enquête et de surveillance (FES), first established in a 1926 decree which made clear it was destined to be used for expenses “that an officer can be called upon to incur for the execution of the mission that he is given”.
More specifically, this refers to the payment of informers, the purchase of goods or services for an investigation (notably in urgent cases or those requiring secrecy).
Enlargement : Illustration 2
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”.
The case against Guéant and Gaudin originally stems from a police raid on Guéant’s home and offices in February 2013, when evidence was found that he had paid several bills with vast sums of cash. Police also found trace of a mysterious foreign bank transfer of 500,000 euros into one of his French bank accounts. Guéant publicly claimed that the large sum came from the sale of two 17th century Dutch paintings of naval scenes. However, art experts were unanimous in declaring the paintings to be worth significantly less, and Guéant never applied, nor received, the official culture ministry export certificate (see more here) which would have been required for the sale.
Importantly, that was when Guéant also claimed that the vast cash sums he disposed of, which he said served to pay for purchases amounting to between 20,000 euros and 25,000 euros, came from a system of bonuses paid by ministries to senior staff, and which he said was regular practice at the interior ministry until 2006.
The 2013 raids were part of a preliminary investigation into the suspected illegal funding of Sarkozy’s 2007 presidential election campaign by late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. That probe was triggered by a Mediapart investigation revealing the existence of an official document written by a senior figure in Libya referring to the regime’s approval of a 50 million-euro payment to Sarkozy's campaign. The former president has denied receiving the funding.
That case is now the subject of a sweeping judicial investigation opened, as a result of the preliminary enquiries, in April 2013.
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- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse