SeleucusNicator
Diadoch
From the New York Times:
First the Saddam bribes, now this. Perhaps it's time to start building a case for regime change to bring before the Security Council? (I mean, they actually have WMDs too!)
French Ex-Premier Is Convicted of Graft
By ELAINE SCIOLINO
PARIS, Jan. 30 In a serious blow to President Jacques Chirac and the future of his governing party, former Prime Minister Alain Juppé was convicted Friday of corruption in a party scheme to create phony City Hall jobs here during part of Mr. Chirac's mayoralty.
Mr. Juppé, 58, one of Mr. Chirac's closest confidants and his preferred successor if he does not seek a third term, was sentenced to an 18-month suspended prison term and disqualified from public office for 10 years.
The sentence throws Mr. Chirac's center-right party, which Mr. Juppé heads, into turmoil just two months before regional midterm elections and, if upheld, would bar Mr. Juppé from seeking the presidency in 2007.
In an unadorned modern courtroom in the Paris suburb in Nanterre, the man whom Mr. Chirac once called "the most brilliant man of his generation" stood ramrod straight and silent as his name was called and the verdict was announced.
"The tribunal condemns you, sir," Catherine Pierce, the chief judge, began in reading the sentence. Her words were met with a collective gasp from the audience in the packed courtroom. Prosecutors had asked for only an eight-month suspended sentence, nothing more.
The court also rejected Mr. Juppé's request that any guilty verdict not be entered into his criminal record. Mr. Juppé declined to speak to journalists, who were held back by police officers in riot gear and left the court through a back door.
Mr. Juppé said earlier this month that he would end his political career if he was barred from public office. Instead, Mr. Juppé's lawyer, Francis Szpiner, called the verdict "legally questionable and unjust" and pledged that his client would appeal, which would put Mr. Juppe's sentence in abeyance.
That will allow Mr. Juppé to keep, temporarily at least, his triple perches of power as mayor of Bordeaux, a member of Parliament and president of Mr. Chirac's party, the Union for a Popular Movement.
Mr. Chirac had no comment after the verdict. But Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin told reporters that he was surprised by the verdict and predicted that it would be overturned.
"Today I want to say with force, with conviction and sincerity that the service of France and of the French needs Alain Juppé," Mr. Raffarin said, adding that "a large majority of the French know that Alain Juppé is a statesman, is a man of honor."
In recent years a new generation of tough judges has taken a harder line on prosecuting corruption, but it is still unusual to win convictions against the political elite or to make them stick.
In 2001, for example, former Foreign Minister Roland Dumas was found guilty of accepting favors from the oil company Elf Aquitaine through his mistress, Christine Deviers-Joncours, a former lingerie model and lobbyist for Elf. But the conviction of Mr. Dumas was overturned by a higher court in 2003.
Mr. Juppé, who has proclaimed his innocence throughout the ordeal, was the most high-profile of 27 people set for trial so far in a scandal that unfolded during Mr. Chirac's 18-year tenure as mayor of Paris.
The president has avoided a serious judicial inquiry into how much he knew of the payment scheme by claiming immunity from prosecution, which he enjoys until his term runs out.
But Mr. Chirac's political enemies were swift to attack him.
"All this fake agitation around the fate of Mr. Juppé cannot make us forget that the real responsible party for the fictitious jobs was Jacques Chirac," the leader of the far-right National Front, Jean-Marie Le Pen, said in a statement. He added, "The extremely harsh sentences given condemn first and foremost the present head of state."
Noël Mamère, a member of the Greens who ran against Mr. Chirac in the presidential election in 2002, said on LCI television, "It's not Mr. Juppé who should have been run out of office, but Chirac."
Meanwhile, the current mayor of Paris, Bernard Delanoë, a Socialist who succeeded Mr. Chirac at City Hall, wants the city's money back, although no one has calculated exactly how much was involved. "More than ever, I want the embezzled sums from the city's treasury to be paid back to the city of Paris," Mr. Delanoë said in a statement.
A three-judge panel ruled that Mr. Juppé knew about and helped promote unsavory ties between City Hall and private companies, which put seven members of the party on their payrolls as fictitious employees between 1989 and 1995 to secure public contracts.
At the time, Mr. Juppé was both City Hall's financial director and secretary general of Mr. Chirac's party, then called the Rally for the Republic. Placed under investigation in 1998, Mr. Juppé steadfastly proclaimed his innocence. "I will defend my honor," he pledged in an interview with Le Monde in September just before the trial began.
During the trial, Mr. Juppé's lawyers said he had not known the seven City Hall employees and had not assigned them to work for the party. Mr. Juppé testified that once he learned that the employees held fake jobs, he made sure that they were given real ones. "These were real jobs," he testified. "All the people worked for the city of Paris."
But during the trial the director of his office from 1988 to 1991, Yves Cabana, told the court that "everyone knew" about the illegal payments.
Mr. Juppé's defenders insist that he is a victim of the questionable political financing common on the left and the right before laws were tightened in the late 1980's and 1990's. Indeed, in the interview with Le Monde, he said: "I am responsible, yes. But surely not guilty."
The ultimate loyalist, Mr. Juppé never put the blame on Mr. Chirac, his lifelong political mentor, for the corruption at City Hall.
The son of a farmer from the southwestern Landes region, Mr. Juppé was a brilliant student who attended the prestigious École Nationale d'Administration and rose through the ranks of the French bureaucracy quickly. He carried out a variety of jobs for Mr. Chirac, from serving as a speechwriter in his 20's to becoming foreign minister and then prime minister in the 1990's.
Mr. Juppé's reputation as a cold and intellectually arrogant technocrat made him highly unpopular. He suffered a humiliating defeat when his attempts at changing social policies led to crippling strikes and a stunning loss to the Socialist Lionel Jospin in the 1997 election.
But Mr. Juppé has remained a leading figure of the French center-right, and he crawled back into the top levels of French political life in 2002 when he became head of Mr. Chirac's conservative party after the center-right won back power.
If Mr. Juppé's legal appeal fails, Mr. Chirac's party will have to fill the void. The popular law-and-order interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, another would-be presidential candidate, would be a likely successor as party chief.
That would give Mr. Sarkozy a platform from which to challenge Mr. Chirac for the French presidency in elections in 2007. But he may have gone too far in recent months by promoting himself, touting his successes and not hiding his ambitions at the expense of his boss.
First the Saddam bribes, now this. Perhaps it's time to start building a case for regime change to bring before the Security Council? (I mean, they actually have WMDs too!)
Oh well, maybe they'll forget to show up!
No wonder people are shocked!
