French President François Hollande on Sunday backed his chief-of-staff, who has come under fire after giving contradictory accounts of a conversation with an opposition politician about ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy's legal troubles, reports Reuters.
The conservative opposition has called on Jean-Pierre Jouyet, Secretary-General of the Elysée presidential palace, to resign after he first denied but later confirmed he had discussed Sarkozy's legal troubles with former prime minister François Fillon at a lunch in June.
"Jean-Pierre Jouyet is Secretary-General of the Elysée, and he is a good Secretary-General of the Elysée," Hollande told reporters at a G20 meeting in Brisbane, in his first public comments about Jouyet.
Newspaper Le Monde has reported that Fillon - who plans to run for president in 2017 - had asked Jouyet to speed up legal cases involving Sarkozy to undermine his political comeback. The affair has dominated news headlines in France in the past week.
Sarkozy is seeking the conservative UMP party's ticket to run for president again but is implicated in a series of legal cases running from influence-peddling to illegal party-funding.
Read more of this report from Reuters.
See also: The discreet lunch that threatens Hollande's top aide and former premier François Fillon