Former French budget minister Jérôme Cahuzac (pictured) last month finally confessed to holding a secret foreign bank account over a period of some 20 years, but he has not publicly disclosed the sums that were paid into it, nor from where they came. However, there has been widespread speculation that the account was used to cash fees paid to Cahuzac for his services, during the 1990s, as a consultant for the pharmaceutical industry. Mediapart has now established that Cahuzac began a lucrative role as lobbyist for a drugs firm just months after leaving his senior post at the French health ministry where he was responsible for the market authorisations of medicines. Mathilde Mathieu and Michaël Hajdenberg report on an extraordinary conflict of interest that also raises serious questions over the conduct of Cahuzac’s former ministerial colleagues who allowed a drug he was lobbying for to continue to be subsidised by the social security system for several years after it was first earmarked to lose its status as a refundable medicine.
The still-unfolding scandal surrounding the secret foreign account of former budget minister Jérôme Cahuzac, first revealed by Mediapart last December, has rocked the French political establishment to its core. But it may not be the last such explosive revelation. For the private Geneva-based financial institution that Cahuzac used to manage his funds hidden abroad, Reyl & Cie, is alleged by several sources contacted by Mediapart to have provided its discreet services to other French personalities - including senior political figures. Dan Israel pieces together a secret and complex financial puzzle, with the help of insiders from the world of finance and banking in Geneva and Paris.
French finance minister Pierre Moscovici is at the centre of allegations that the government was involved in a cover-up to support Jérôme Cahuzac after Mediapart revealed last December that the then-budget minister, leading a crackdown on tax fraud, held a secret bank account abroad. In this lengthy interview with Mediapart’s Laurent Mauduit and Martine Orange, Moscovici defends his role during the four months in which he stood by Cahuzac, despite the mounting evidence presented by Mediapart that his junior minister and one-time friend consistently lied about holding hidden funds abroad. Moscovici reveals that the former budget minister, who finally confessed earlier this month, after repeated denials, to holding the account, declined to provide a written statement requested by tax authorities last December as to whether he held or not a secret account. But surprisingly that did not cause alarm among his colleagues. “Faced with the firmness and the number of his denials,” Moscovici says, “I had the tendency and the wish to believe Jérôme Cahuzac.”
President François Hollande has announced tough new measures to help 'clean up' public life in France following the Cahuzac affair. There will be a new body to oversee politicians' financial assets, more staff to tackle tax fraud and a promised war on international tax havens. However, as Lénaïg Bredoux reports, the proposals have been met not just with predictable disapproval from the opposition, but with dismay from some sections of his own Socialist Party too.
First panic then a state of limbo overtook the French government after the shock confession of former budget minister Jérôme Cahuzac over his Swiss bank account. Now president François Hollande, under great pressure from all sides of the political debate and amid growing public disenchantment, looks set to announce major new measures in a bid to improve the 'morals' of French politics. Lénaïg Bredoux and Mathieu Magnaudeix report.
The latest twists in the Cahuzac affair show that money, when it becomes an end in itself, is like crime in its desire to escape the law. Here Mediapart republishes an article by Editor-in-Chief Edwy Plenel in which he sets out how tax evasion has become a colossal and institutionalised business at the centre of the economy. Fighting it has never been more urgent, he argues, yet little effort - if any - is being made to prevent it or to sanction those who are bleeding society of vital resources.
In a brief pre-recorded television appearance President François Hollande sought to regain the political initiative after the damaging and hugely embarrassing admission by his former budget minister Jérôme Cahuzac that he did have a secret Swiss bank account. However, two of the three policy proposals unveiled by the president to prevent further scandals had already been announced and the third may face constitutional obstacles. Meanwhile the opposition says the president failed to answer key questions about his own role in the Cahuzac affair, as pressure also mounted on another key government figure, finance minister Pierre Moscovici.
While Jérôme Cahuzac has admitted to holding secret foreign bank accounts, after four months of vehement denials, there remain many unanswered questions. Just how many foreign accounts did he hold and where? How many other people, and who, were helped in tax avoidance by Cahuzac's personal financial advisors? Why did the tax authorities refuse to investigate Cahuzac? Fabrice Arfi reports.
