Former French President Jacques Chirac (pictured) was on Thursday given a two-year suspended prison sentence for embezzling public funds when he was mayor of Paris to finance his political party and advisors for his presidential election campaign strategy. Chirac, 79, is the second French head of state to be tried by a court of justice, after the country's wartime collaborationist Vichy government leader, Marshal Philippe Pétain, in 1945. Michel Deléan reports.
For decades he has enjoyed close personal and professional relations with French-speaking Africa's most prominent leaders, including notorious despots. Robert Bourgi (photo), dubbed ‘Monsieur Afrique' in France, is an advisor and go-between for both the French presidency and African heads of state. He created a political storm in September after publicly accusing his one-time boss, former President Jacques Chirac, along with former Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, of receiving millions of euros in secret cash payments from several African leaders. Mediapart has obtained exclusive access to a statement he gave earlier this month to magistrates in which he details the cash payment claims, including an alleged lunchtime gift to Villepin of one million euros by the president of Equatorial Guinea. Fabrice Arfi and Karl Laske report.
When Al Qaeda terrorists hijacked four airliners in the US, slamming two of them into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York and another onto The Pentagon building in Virginia on September 11th 2001, governments across the world were gripped by alarm and panic that more was to follow on their own soil. In France, the crisis exposed the dangerous confusion over the power shared between president and prime minister. Which of them, for example, had the power to order the shooting down of an airliner headed for a nuclear power plant? Mediapart reproduces here revealing extracts from a book published in France this month which recounts the staggering conflict during the crisis between then-President Jacques Chirac and his prime minister, Lionel Jospin.
It began with an article published by Mediapart. Now it has become known in France as l'affaire Karachi and dubbed 'Karachigate' by the international press. It is potentially one of the biggest French political scandals of the past two decades, engulfing President Nicolas Sarkozy along with a former president and two ex-prime ministers. Here we present a simple Q & A guide to help understand a complex and fast-moving story involving multi-billion-euro arms deals, political funding, shell companies, shadowy intermediaries - and the murders of 11 French naval engineers.
