After former French president Nicolas Sarkozy’s lawyer Thierry Herzog admitted earlier this week that he had instructed his client to use a prepaid mobile phone registered under the alias Paul Bismuth, the real Paul Bismuth is considering a lawsuit, reports FRANCE 24.
“I feared, with good reason, [that his phone had been] tapped and so arranged to communicate with Nicolas Sarkozy without being listened in on, which, alas, I was right to do,” Herzog told French daily Le Monde in the wake of revelations that judges had ordered the former president’s phones be tapped as part of an ongoing criminal investigation.
But Paul Bismuth, the alias under which Herzog chose to register the mobile phone, belongs to a real person. Bismuth happens to be a childhood friend of Herzog’s and is a real estate developer in Israel. He is also none too happy about the situation.
Herzog and Bismuth have known each other for decades. The two went to the same secondary school in Paris’s ninth arrondissement, where they became friends in the mid-1960s.
Read more of this report from FRANCE 24.