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.”
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.
Last weekend, the French government announced it had agreed to issue a state guarantee for Crédit Immobilier de France, a major cooperative-owned mortgage lender for low-income households. The bank ran into severe liquidity problems because of its structural dependence on what was cheap financing from the credit market. The new soicialist government’s move was widely portrayed as a rescue of the troubled mortgage lender. But nothing could be further from the truth, argues Mediapart’s economics and finance correspondent Philippe Riès. CIF is to be run down, with serious consequences for jobs and modest house-buyers, while the real winners of the guarantee are the big banks. For they have escaped helping in a bailout and are now sure their loans to CIF will be repaid.
