The French parliamentary commission of enquiry into the government’s handling of the Jérôme Cahuzac affair – or more precisely, if it had attempted to protect the budget minister who held a secret foreign bank account – was close to implosion Thursday after its sitting conservative Members of Parliament (MPs) decided to suspend their participation because of a decision not to summon socialist Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault to testify before it.
The revelations of the Cahuzac affair and the disclosures of witnesses before the commission have shaken France’s political and business elite amidst increasing evidence that the former minister is far from a lone wolf among in engaging in tax evasion.
The commission’s hearings, which are broadcast on television, have thrown up allegations of connivance on high in an organised system of tax evasion mounted by Swiss financial institutions, and the circumstances of the suspension of its proceedings has dealt a serious blow to French government’s attempts to demonstrate total transparency over the Cahuzac affair.
The cross-party commission, which began its hearings in May, is investigating events between December 2012, when Mediapart first exposed Cahuzac’s possession of a tax-evading account managed in Switzerland, and April this year, when the minister finally confessed to holding it after four months of denials. It suspects the government of creating a smokescreen around the affair, and notably by launching a remarkably incomplete cooperation demand with the Swiss authorities the results of which were subsequently used to whitewash the minister.
Cahuzac appeared for a second time before the commission on Tuesday, when he was asked to confirm earlier testimony by finance minister Pierre Moscovici who detailed an “informal” January 16th meeting between himself and the-then budget minister, at which was also present Ayrault and President François Hollande.
The meeting was first revealed in a book about the affair published this month, quoting from an account given by Hollande.
Questioned about it by the commission last week, Moscovici said that was when Cahuzac was informed of an imminent move by the finance ministry’s tax administration services to ask the Swiss authorities to confirm or deny the existence of his account with the UBS bank.
Questioned on Tuesday, Cahuzac claimed he could not remember such a meeting. “As of the moment that I have no recollection [of being] in the presidential office, for me this meeting was never held,” he said.
The importance of the contradictions between Moscovici’s account and that of Cahuzac centres on the discussions that may have been had during the meeting about the decision to ask the Swiss, via the finance ministry’s services, whether they had a record of the existence of the Cahuzac’s account. The move was highly unusual, given that a preliminary investigation into Mediapart's disclosures had already been opened by the Paris public prosecutor's office. At the time, Cahuzac had repeatedly publicly denied, including before parliament, ever holding an account abroad.
The subsequent request submitted to the Swiss authorities concerned only the UBS bank, whereas Mediapart had already revealed that Cahuzac’s secret funds were in fact managed by the Geneva-based financial institution, which is now also a bank, Reyl & Cie. The request also only covered the period from 2006, whereas Mediapart had also disclosed that Cahuzac had held a foreign account for some 20 years – a fact eventually confirmed by Cahuzac himself.
The Swiss reply was that they were aware of no account with UBS in Cahuzac’s name, and Cahuzac’s PR team subsequently leaked the results to the press, prompting weekly paper Le JDD to claim, in a banner headline, that Cahuzac had been vindicated.
Cahuzac’s denials that the January 16th meeting had ever been held prompted the commission’s conservative members to immediately call for Ayrault to give his account as to whether the meeting, confirmed by finance minister Moscovici, had or not occurred.
But in a poll of its members on Wednesday, the commission’s majority group of Socialist Party MPs rejected en bloc the motion to summon Ayrault as a witness, defeating the conservatives by ten votes to eight.
Afterwards, the conservative UMP party MP and commission member Daniel Fasquelle said “the [ruling] majority has just taken an extremely grave decision by refusing to question the prime minister”.
“We have decided to suspend our participation in the commission’s work up until we have heard the prime minister,” he announced. He described the blocking move by the socialist MPs as a “proper knife blow” to the spirit of cross-party cooperation in establishing the truth behind the Cahuzac affair. “If the [ruling] majority really has nothing to hide it has no reason to oppose the questioning of Jean-Marc Ayrault and to refuse to hear the head of government is in reality to refuse to find all the truth about, and shed all the light on, the Cahuzac affair,” Fasquelle told France Info radio.
Hollande and Moscovici give contradictory accounts
The impasse into which the commission has now been driven appears absurd given that President Hollande personally confirmed the existence of the January 16th meeting with Cahuzac in a recently-published book on the affair, (‘Jérôme Cahuzac, eye to eye’), and which first revealed it had happened. Its author, Charlotte Chaffonjon, a journalist with weekly news magazine Le Point, bases her account of the meeting on an interview with Hollande.
“On Wednesday January 16th 2013, on the sidelines of a weekly [government] cabinet meeting, François Hollande and Jean-Marc Ayrault summoned Pierre Moscovici and Jérôme Cahuzac to the presidential office,” she writes. “The two heads of the executive ask the minister of economy and finance to launch a request to Switzerland for cooperation [...] ‘Because you are unable to get a response by personal means, we’ll go by conventional means’ explain François Hollande and Jean-Marc Ayrault to Jérôme Cahuzac, who has no other option than to accept.”
That account was confirmed by Moscovici before the parliamentary commission of enquiry last week, except for one detail: according to the finance minister, the meeting was not held in the president’s office but in a salon “adjoining” the room where the cabinet meets. Importantly, it is also a detail that throws doubt on the president’s role in the affair.
For while Hollande has authenticated the account in Charlotte Chaffonjon’s book, the ministers questioned by the commission until now have insisted that Cahuzac was deliberately kept in total isolation from any involvement in the enquiries by the fiscal administration – of which he was officially head as budget minister - to establish the existence or not of his account.
The claims that what Pierre Moscovici described as “a Great Wall of China” was erected around Cahuzac have even gone as far as assertions made before the commission by the ministers of the interior and justice that during the period until Cahuzac’s confession in April they never spoke between themselves or other ministers about his case.
Moscovici’s testimony that Cahuzac was kept from interference in the ministry’s verifications of his account with the Swiss was publicly thrown into doubt by the commission’s chairman, centrist MP Charles de Courson, in several media interviews. Moscovici angrily replied in an open letter to Courson published in daily Le Monde when he questioned Courson’s political “bias”.
When the finance ministry’s request to the Swiss authorities for information was sent in early February, and while Cahuzac continued to vehemently deny the existence of an account abroad, iMediapart’s investigations exposing it continued to be attacked as unsubstantiated and unjustified by the political class and sections of the French media. After the publication of the negative Swiss reply, the socialist speaker of the lower house, the National Assembly – the fourth most powerful political office in the French state – even called upon Mediapart “to stop” with its reporting of Cahuzac’s tax evasion.
Mediapart’s repeated requests to the presidential office, the prime minister’s office and to the finance ministry for an answer to our questions over the cooperation request with the Swiss were met with no response. The consequence of this is that none of the official accounts that are currently emerging can be called into question, except over their contradictions.
Appearing before the commission on May 28th, the head of France’s general directorate of public finances (DGFIP), Bruno Bézard, claimed responsibility for initiating all the administrative procedures with the Swiss. “On January 14th we were preparing our request [to Switzerland] for administrative assistance,” he told the commission, citing a date that was two days earlier than the meeting Hollande has confirmed was held with Cahuzac in the presence of Ayrault and Moscovici.
According to Bézard, that was also when he told Moscovici, and that he then suggested that the minister should contact his Swiss counterpart, Éveline Widmer-Schlumpf, to attempt to speed up the process.
In an interview with Mediapart published in April, Moscovici said it was he himself who initiated the procedure, and that he had contacted Swiss finance minister Widmer-Schlumpf on two occasions. “When I launched this cooperation [request] with Switzerland, it was because it had been too long since the question was raised [about Cahuzac’s account] and it was still on the table,” Moscovici said. At the time, he made no mention of the meeting between Cahuzac, Hollande, Ayrault and himself as first cited in Charlotte Chaffonjon’s book published this month.
Hollande (and Ayrault), finance minister Moscovici and the head of his fiscal services, Bruno Bézard, all contradict each other in their separate claims of being responsible for making the request to the Swiss. One thing that is certain is that while Moscovici has always maintained he initiated the procedure, Hollande and Ayrault have changed their accounts of events following Cahuzac’s exit from government in March (when he became the subject of a judicial investigation) and his confession, on April 2nd, to holding a secret account.
If Cahuzac had confirmed before the commission on Tuesday that he was involved in a meeting with the president, prime minister and finance minister on January 16th, he would have faced serious judicial consequences. In his previous appearance, he had insisted that he was never made aware of the request to the Swiss authorities, and his denials this week that the meeting took place remain consistent with that. Cahuzac was warned by the commission’s chairman that any evidence of perjury would immediately prompt legal proceedings.
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English version by Graham Tearse