A report led by the heads of the French Court of Audit and the Council of State recommending an overhaul of the lavish life-long privileges accorded to former French presidents which, together with security protection costs, total 10.3 million euros per year, has been gathering dust for more than two years since it was handed to President François Hollande.
The 26-page document, revealed here (further below) by Mediapart, advises that the millions of euros in private perks granted annually to the country’s three surviving former presidents, and which include payment of domestic and office staff, the rental of offices and apartments, cars, travel and miscellaneous other items including even dry-cleaning and stamps, be reduced in the interests of “modernization, transparency and control of public spending”.
Commissioned by Hollande and published by the Court of Audit, France’s national body of auditors, it provides for the first time an official account of the spending on former presidents Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, 90, Jacques Chirac, 83, and Nicolas Sarkozy, 61.
In February this year, after an independent commission for the right of access to administrative documents, the CADA, approved its request for the detail of the sums paid to former presidents and prime ministers, Mediapart revealed the staggering catalogue of payments made during 2014. Among the anecdotal miscellaneous sums, Giscard d’Estaing, who was ousted from office more than three decades ago after his 1981 election defeat at the hands of the late François Mitterrand, received 10,571 euros for his newspaper and magazine purchases alone, along with 5,000 euros for car fuel.
Mediapart estimated that in 2014, excluding the cost of security personnel and equipment, Giscard d’Estaing received a total of 2.5 million euros, followed by Sarkozy with 2.2 million euros, and by Chirac with 1.5 million euros. Most of this is claimed back from the state by the three in the form of reimbursements.
While recommending an overhaul of the perks paid to former heads of state, the report handed to Hollande by the audit court and state council heads Didier Migaud and Jean-Marc Sauvé in 2014, and updated this March, does not propose sweeping changes. It suggests that the payments be progressively reduced in the years following a president’s departure from office. It notes that “the needs linked to the functions [of former presidents] decrease in relation to the distance since the end of a mandate”.
Among Sarkozy’s state-paid staff, despite his return to active politics as the president of the conservative UMP party (now renamed Les Républicains) in 2014, included that year a press attaché and the post of “international affairs advisor” handed to the half-sister of his wife Carla Bruni. The total cost to the public purse of Sarkozy’s private central Paris offices in 2014 came to 215,392 euros including rent, maintenance and petty expenses, cleaning and electricity charges, but also the costs of items such as sheets of paper, stamps and phone bills.
Meanwhile, Jacques Chirac (who has also been lent 14 state-owned artworks) suffers serious health problems , including reduced cognitive powers that led to his resignation from the constitutional council in 2010, and his absence during a 2011 trial for his role in a graft scam at Paris city hall, when he was found guilty on charges including ‘misuse of public funds’ and ‘breach of trust’ for which he received a two-year suspended prison sentence.
The justification of the allocation of vast public funds for the benefit of this once-ruling elite is a 1985 type-written letter by then-socialist prime minister Laurent Fabius addressed to then-president François Mitterrand. Its legality has been frequently questioned, most recently by the anti-corruption campaigning organisation Anticor, which has submitted to the Council of State, the supreme administrative court and advisory body on legal matters to the presidency, a demand that it be annulled.
Among the perks detailed in the letter signed by Fabius, establishing “the statute in the nation of former presidents”, it provides for them to receive a furnished apartment for office use, a car and two chauffeurs, an administrative staff of seven, two domestic staff, phones and free air, rail and sea travel (in their report, Migaud and Sauvé found incidences where “the number of cars and chauffeurs” enjoyed by the former presidents went beyond that set out in “the framework defined”).
On top of these ‘private’ perks, the former presidents also receive a gross annual payment of 65,000 euros, as set out in a 1955 law which allows that, in the event of the beneficiary’s death, the sum should continue to be paid to the widow. On top of this, every former head of state is currently automatically allocated a seat at the Constitutional Council, for which they receive a yearly gross salary of 172,800 euros (which no longer applies to Chirac and Sarkozy, both having resigned from the body).
President Hollande commissioned Migaud and Sauvé to prepare an evaluation of the perks in 2013, when he also announced that he was in favour of ending - as of his own departure from office - the automatic appointment of former presidents to the Constitutional Council.
Migaud and Sauvé stepped back from proposing any revolutionary change to the system, stating that “the public resources allocated to former heads of state are the consequence of the dignity of the functions held and the diverse expenses that continue to be attached to them”. They therefore advise that the 1985 letter by Fabius be replaced with a government decree that clearly sets the principle of the perks into law.
However, after comparing the allocation provided to former French presidents with what is attributed to former heads of state or government in a number of other countries (including the united States, Britain and Germany), they observe that “the system of material support which benefits former presidents is at a higher level than those which exist abroad”.
The report calls for a “rationalisation” and “adaptation” of the generous system provided for three decades ago. This includes a reduction of half of the state-paid staff, both administrative and domestic, ten years after a president has left office. Migaud and Sauvé propose that this be introduced as of the end of Hollande’s mandate, while for Giscard d’Estaing, Chirac and Sarkozy it would be calculated as of the moment such a reform was made law.
They also call for general expenses and spending on travel and representation functions to be “taken into account upon provision of receipts” in order to ensure that they are indeed “linked to the functions of a former president”. Furthermore, a ceiling should be placed on these expenses and set out in each annual state budget bill of law. As for the granting to former presidents the right to free travel by air, rail and sea, the report said this had become “obsolete”. “The granting of such advantages is as of now down to the boards of the company’s concerned,” it said.
Finally, they advise putting an end to the privileges granted to the widows of former heads of state, which include a furnished apartment, a car and a chauffeur, an administrative employee and free travel on the French rail network. The report observed, however, that these had never been applied until present (only the late François Mitterrand’s wife, Danielle, would have qualified).
Reform of perks system hinges on Council of State ruling
When they began preparing their report, Migaud and Sauvé had assumed that President François Hollande would succeed with his planned reform of the Constitutional Council. This would have meant that Hollande and his successors would not be automatically be given a place on the Constitutional Council, and therefore would not receive the yearly 172, 800 euros gross salary currently paid to sitting former presidents. Migaud and Sauvé proposed compensating that lost revenue by raising the 65,000-euro (gross) yearly emolument paid to former presidents to 145,000 (almost equal to that currently paid to former presidents of the United States). However, they also allowed for this to be halved in the event that the recipient began “remunerated activity”, such as being paid to take part in conferences.
In the event, Hollande failed to receive the necessary backing of at least three-fifths of both houses of parliament to push through the reform, since abandoned. As a result, the report was updated to advise that the yearly emolument remain at 65,000 euros, whether or not the recipient carries out remunerated activity and whatever the revenues from that are.
The question now remains as to whether Hollande will render public the report and announce a reform of the system of privileges set out by Fabius in 1985.
Enlargement : Illustration 2
Contacted by Mediapart, the presidential office said any decision will have to await the ruling of the Council of State on the case brought by Anticor, and which is expected to be announced within three weeks. If the outcome is that Fabius’s letter is found to have no legal foundation, the Elysée Palace will have to substitute it with a decree defining the situation. “We will look at the [Council of State] decision and all of its preambles,” said an Elysée source, speaking on condition of anonymity, while dismissing the suggestion that Hollande has simply sat on the report. “There was no mischief,” said the source. “I remind you that it was us who launched this review. We’re trying to do things properly. We’re waiting for the ongoing litigation to reach an end.”
Just what the Council of State will decide is hard to guess. In its submission to the council in April, Anticor underlined that Fabius’s letter had no proper legal foundation , and also that the privileges currently enjoyed by Nicolas Sarkozy violate the principle of equality between candidates running for the 2017 presidential elections.
During the hearing at the Council of State held on September 14th, the public rapporteur - the administrative official whose role is to analyse the arguments and seek a solution – found against the case presented by Anticor and recommended the council reject it. “This correspondence of 1985 does indeed have the nature of a regulatory act,” she said. “Nothing prevents, in purely formal terms, that a decree can be made by a prime minister on writing paper.” As for Sarkozy, she said that it was for the regulatory authorities overseeing the election to investigate his eventual campaign finances and to ensure that they had not benefitted from no irregular or dissimulated funding.
While it is more likely than not that council would follow the conclusions of the rapporteur, there have been exceptions in the past. Furthermore, a recent case brought before an administrative tribunal took an opposite view. In June, the Paris administrative court heard a case brought by Green party militant and anti-corruption campaigner Raymond Avrillier also querying the legality of the 1985 Fabius letter. During the hearing, the public rapporteur declared that the text was “without any doubt illegal”. But Avrillier lost the case on a legal technicality.
Meanwhile, socialist MP René Dosière, who has long campaigned for the transparency of spending within the corridors of power - and on the former presidents - is pushing for a vote in the National Assembly, the lower house of French parliament, on the issue. Dosière, 75, has spent several years piecing together through patient research what the three ex- heads of state receive, tirelessly questioning the prime minister’s office which oversees the spending, and various ministries.
Enlargement : Illustration 3
His latest estimation of the total spent on the three, published on his blog in April, was 9.6 million euros, close to the Court of audit’s finding of 10.3 million euros. Dosière found that Giscard d’Estaing cost the public purse the most, at a yearly 3.9 million euros, of which 2.5 million euros is spent on his security (including 1.3 million euros for the surveillance of his country home in Authon, west-central France). In second position came Nicolas Sarkozy, costing a yearly 3.3 million euros (1.8 million euros on security), followed by Jacques Chirac at 2.4 million euros (1.3 million on security, including 500,000 euros for gendarmerie surveillance of his château de Bity country home in the Corrèze département - or county - in central France).
Dosière has filed a resolution to the socialist parliamentary group which is to be put to a vote in the National Assembly, arguing that it is “necessary to clarify and limit the rights and advantages tied to the status of former president”. He believes there should be an increase to the 65,000-euro emolument of former heads of state, but that there should be no salary paid for those who sit on the Constitutional Council. He also wants a limit of five years to be placed on the parks the ex-presidents receive, which would be ended earlier in the case of those who enter active politics or who have remunerated activities (with the exception of what he calls “intellectual activities”).
Dosière told Medipart he was “waiting for the green light” from the socialist group to present his resolution before the Assembly. “I was told it was coming, but for the moment it hasn’t come,” he told Mediapart. Asked about the stance of the presidency, which has kept the report by Didier Migaud and Jean-Marc Sauvé under wraps (until its publication here), Dosière commented: “Everything seemed sorted out some time ago already. They were ready for the application of the Migaud-Sauvé report. Then there were internal discussions and visibly they questioned the timing of taking action on the eve of an election. So it’s remained on standby. Now they’re waiting for the [decision by] the Council of State. If the 1985 decision is annulled, they will be forced to take action.” In which case Dosière and others will hope that François Hollande will take the opportunity of proposing a more sweeping reform than the moderate one proposed by the report.
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- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse