There was a display of irritation, arrogance and a small show of humility on Tuesday when the French parliamentary commission of enquiry into the Jérôme Cahuzac tax evasion scandal was finally able to question three senior government ministers over their role in the affair.
Set up in May by the National Assembly, the French lower house, the commission, made up of a cross-party membership of 40 Members of Parliament (MPs), is attempting to establish whether there was any malpractice by the government during the four months when budget minister Cahuzac, exposed by Mediapart last December as having held a secret foreign bank account over a period of some 20 years, desperately tried to maintain his government post and political future with vehement public denials that he was involved in tax evasion.
While Cahuzac eventually confessed in April to holding secret assets abroad, he had, ever since Mediapart’s initial revelations, enjoyed the backing of the government and notably finance minister Pierre Moscovici.
Moscovici appeared before the commission on Tuesday, along with justice minister Christine Taubira and interior minister Manuel Valls. During their separate hearings, all three ministers insisted they had never, during the developing events that began last December, discussed the affair with fellow ministers – a claim met with outspoken scepticism from the commission’s members – and each denied any involvement in wrongdoing.
While left-wing MPs sitting on the commission largely kept a low profile on Tuesday, those from the right-wing parliamentary opposition made clear that they were unconvinced by the ministers’ versions of events. “We’re being taken for fools,” commented conservative UMP party MP, Daniel Fasquelle, after the hearings. “The ministers concerned wouldn’t have talked [about Cahuzac] amongst themselves? There were very serious dysfunctions. The affair could have been sorted out quicker. Things could have been made clear as of the end of December.”
His UMP colleague Philippe Houillon also dismissed the ministers’claim that they did not discuss the Cahuzac case among themselves. “So no-one talked of anything amid a situation that was as serious as this?” he asked. “It is a political problem and no-one talks during four months? Isn’t that the dysfunction?”
The first of the ministers to be questioned was justice minister Christiane Taubira. “As for all of you,” she told the commission, “I had no reason to question Jérôme Cahuzac’s statements.” Taubira argued that, in the context of what she described as her “20 hours per day” working schedule, “it was not a preoccupation for me”.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
“The judicial process progressed, Cahuzac gave denials [of evading tax]. I didn’t engage in any philosophical analysis,” she said.
The justice minister claimed she did not have the “availability” to personally monitor the enquiry, adding that she had sent “three or four” phone text messages relating the progress of the enquiry, after it was opened on January 8th, to Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault.
In fact, as the commission reminded the justice minister, her office was kept regularly informed of the progression of the preliminary enquiry into the affair opened by the Paris public prosecutor’s office. Out of a total of 56 separate reports on the case prepared by the prosecutor’s office, 54 were sent to Taubira’s office.
Importantly, Taubira claimed she had never spoken about the Cahuzac case with President François Hollande, nor with interior minister Manuel Valls or finance minister Pierre Moscovici, and nor with Cahuzac himself. “I did not ask myself whether Jérôme Cahuzac was guilty or not,” Taubira told the commission.
Concerning the lawsuit for defamation launched by Cahuzac against Mediapart following its initial investigations exposing his secret bank accounts abroad - an unusual move which caused a controversy within her own ministry - Taubira said she did not herself consult the text of the complaint. “I hadn’t read it,” she told the commission. “It was [a] massive [document]. I had neither the availability, nor the interest. My role is to transmit […] And what a good thing I didn’t become involved, because that would signify that I involved myself in a complaint lodged against a media [organization] by a minister. If I had done so, I would today have to explain such zeal.”
She was also asked for her opinion about the opening by the French finance ministry of its own parallel investigation into the evidence that Cahuzac held a secret Swiss bank account, and which notably gained a response from the Swiss authorities that they had no knowledge of such an account. The public prosecutor has already expressed his own surprise at the finance ministry’s initiative, which involved the budget minister’s own services and which shadowed the judicial investigation. “Did this fiscal investigation hinder the criminal investigation? Incontestably not,” she answered. “By law, the tax administration was entitled to do what it did, it’s a normal procedure.”
After an hour of questioning by the commission, and what had been a largely calm presentation by Taubira, the atmosphere became noticeably tense amid the persistent questions. “My responsibility is that the justice system works properly,” Taubira said in answer to further questioning by UMP party MP Daniel Fasquelle. “And it happens to be the case that it worked well, that it was efficient, that it was diligent […] There was no dysfunction of the justice system. If there had been one, tell me which.”
Taubira displayed increasing annoyance, and a degree of arrogance, at critical questions from MPs from her own socialist majority, notably about what exactly she knew about the evidence against Cahuzac. Importantly, in an aside to commission members that was not picked up by the microphones in front of her, she said she had been “persuaded of his [Cahuzac’s] innocence”.
At the end of the hearing, the justice minister dismissed questions from reporters with the curt comment that “I have already done a lot of talking”.
Commission head slams Hollande, Ayrault and Moscovici
After Taubira it was the turn of interior minister Manuel Valls to be questioned by the commission. Valls, who had turned up early carrying several folders of documents under his arm, was forced to wait for commission members to return from the parliamentary chamber where they were taking part in a vote on an unrelated issue. When the hearing finally began, an impatient Valls gave his version of events in six minutes flat.
He said that prior to Mediapart’s revelations, beginning last December 4th, he had “not been informed” of a foreign bank account belonging to Jérôme Cahuzac, who he had known since the late 1980s. Valls said that following the publication of Mediapart’s first article revealing Cahuzac’s secret account, the latter had “on several occasions” personally told Valls that the reports were false.
Enlargement : Illustration 2
Valls said that the intelligence services, the Direction centrale du renseignement intérieur, the DCRI, which are under his command, carried out no investigation into Cahuzac’s hidden accounts, although an archived report by the DCRI into the activities of Swiss bank UBS had been consulted. It did not, said Valls, refer to Jérôme Cahuzac.
“I in no manner asked the DCRI to investigate Jérôme Cahuzac, and it was not for me to do so,” Valls told the commission. He said that such a move would have been to renew with the practices “of another age” and would have represented “a major error”. Valls said he had “never” had “any contact” about the Cahuzac case with another serving minister. In discussions he did admit to having with President Hollande and Prime Minister Ayrault, Valls said: “I had always told the president and prime minister that I had no element at my disposal concerning the veracity of Mediapart’s information”. By implication, he denied a persistent rumour reported among political circles at the end of last year that he had sent an unofficial report on the case to Hollande.
When opposition MP Daniel Fasquelle asked where Valls met with Hollande and Ayrault, the interior minister replied that the talks were held at the Elysée presidential office and at the prime minister’s office at the Hôtel Matignon, adding in an ironic tone that “I can give you the addresses”.
Little was revealed about Valls’ relations with Stéphane Fouks, executive co-chairman of advertising and PR group Havas Worldwide, and who personally served as Jérôme Cahuzac’s PR advisor during the four months when the former budget minister denied Mediapart’s revelations. Valls confirmed that he had been in contact with Fouks during this period, but none of the commission’s members pressed him for more information about the nature of the contact. Nor did the commission raise any questions about Alain Bauer, a criminologist and political advisor and friend of both Valls and Fouks since the 1980s, who told French daily Le Monde that he had been well aware of the existence of Cahuzac’s secret foreign bank account.
The third and last member of government questioned on Tuesday was interior minister Pierre Moscovici, who is widely regarded as being the most exposed to the fallout of the Cahuzac affair.
Moscovici’s much-awaited appearance began with his own presentation of the suspicions surrounding his role. “Four things have been levelled against me,” he began, “complicity, duplicity, incompetence and manipulation.” He denied all of the attacks, saying that “we did everything that was within our power” to establish the truth about Cahuzac’s tax-dodging account.
Moscovici, like Taubira and Valls before him, denied ever discussing the developing Cahuzac scandal with other ministers. He said his approach to the affair was best summed up as a method of “methodic doubt” as set out by 17th-century French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes. Moscovici said he had on several occasions established a “Great Wall of China” around his budget minister.
Questioned by commission members about the parallel investigation into the existence of Cahuzac’s secret account launched by Moscovici’s ministry behind the back of the public prosecutor’s office, Moscovici claimed total responsibility for the initiative.
This contradicts an account given by both President Hollande and Prime Minister Ayrault, who, in a recently published book on the Cahuzac scandal – ‘Les yeux dans les yeux’ (‘Eye to eye’) written by French journalist Charlotte Chaffanjo – also claim responsibility for the investigation by the ministry’s fiscal administration.
The conclusions of that investigation were used by Cahuzac to support his initial denials of holding an account abroad (he eventually confessed to the existence of the account on April 2nd). This hinged on a reply by the Swiss authorities to the French finance ministry that they had no knowledge of an account held in Switzerland by Cahuzac at the UBS bank. However, the wording of the ministry’s request for information sent to the Swiss authorities concerned only UBS, and excluded mention of the bank that in fact managed Cahuzac’s secret assets, Reyl & Cie.
In early February, soon after the Swiss reply was received, French weekly Le JDD leaked the investigation’s findings under the headline “the Swiss whitewash Cahuzac”, and Moscovici publicly leant Cahuzac his support.
Chaffanjo’s book reveals that on January 16th, following a French government cabinet meeting, François Hollande, Jean-Marc Ayrault, Pierre Moscovici and Jérôme Cahuzac met together for talks in a salon adjoining the cabinet room. Moscovici confirmed that Cahuzac was “informed” that an administrative investigation was to be opened by the ministry, but insisted that “he was not associated with the wording of the question [to be sent to the Swiss authorities] and had never been given the Swiss reply”.
During his own appearance before the parliamentary commission on June 26th, Cahuzac denied ever being informed of the launching of the ministry investigation.
While Moscovici’s political future remains uncertain given the unfolding revelations that suggest an attempt to protect Cahuzac, he was on Tuesday the only one of the three ministers to display a certain humbleness instead of irritation at being called to account.
Meanwhile, the parliamentary commission’s chairman, centrist MP Charles de Courson, on Wednesday told French public TV channel France 2 that he believed President François Hollande had sufficient information as far back as December to conclude that there was “serious” proof of the existence of Cahuzac’s account.
“At the current stage of our work, the response given to this affair by the president, the prime minister and Pierre Moscovici was not appropriate,” he said.
Courson said the meeting between Hollande, Ayrault, Moscovici and Cahuzac on January 16th was in contradiction with a pledge made by Cahuzac , then still budget minister, that he would not be involved in his administration’s examination of the evidence against him. He added that the French request for information sent to the Swiss authorities, and which cited only the UBS bank, “accredited the idea that he [Cahuzac] was innocent because the reply could only be a negative one”.
“Between December 4th and 18th,” added Courson, “the president had all the information allowing him to realise that serious proof [of Cahuzac’s guilt] existed.
- Click here for the video in full of Christiane Taubira's hearing, and here for those of Manuel Valls and Pierre Moscovici.
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English version by Graham Tearse