A former prime minister widely seen as the French right's next presidential candidate insisted in court Tuesday that he knew nothing about a jobs scam at Paris city hall that could end up wrecking his political career.
Alain Juppe, now the influential head of President Jacques Chirac's ruling UMP party, is the most senior of 27 people on trial for their alleged role in a huge jobs-for-the-boys scheme in which the city hall and private companies paid the salaries of up to 175 activists from the RPR, the UMP's predecessor that launched Chirac to power.
Job scam
Juppe, 58, was in charge of the city hall's finances for most of the 18 years that Chirac was mayor of Paris, and also general secretary of the RPR between 1988 and 1993, when the scam was at its height. He was prime minister from 1995 to 1997 during Chirac's first term as president, and is widely tipped as his most likely successor.
Appearing comfortable and relaxed in the witness box, Juppe -- who if convicted faces up to five years in prison and a ban from holding elected office -- said he had "no knowledge of a fictitious jobs scheme when I arrived at the city hall in 1988."
He also formally contested the term "fake jobs," insisting that "these were real jobs" and that everyone concerned "worked for the city of Paris." Nonetheless, he told the court, as soon as he learned of the scheme's existence, he set about trying to end it.
Undermined
Juppe's defense was undermined last week when a number of key witnesses told the court that the jobs scheme was common knowledge within the RPR. While he did not mention Juppe by name, one of Chirac's former aides, Yves Cabana, said that "everyone knew" that party officials held non-existent jobs while Chirac was Paris mayor.
A former RPR treasurer, Louise-Yvonne Casetta, also told the court that she encouraged several companies to put RPR employees on their payrolls, and said she was illegally paid by the city hall and a private company for 13 years.
And a former finance director of the RPR, Jacques Rigault, said unnamed senior figures within the RPR failed to authorise him to end the scheme.
Finally, a succession of company directors filed through the courtroom in Nanterre, just outside Paris, to say they had been "harassed" or "blackmailed" into taking RPR officials on to their payroll in the full knowledge that they would never do a day's work for the company. In exchange, the businessmen said, they were offered the prospect of lucrative contracts from the RPR-run city hall.
The public prosecutor has decided there is insufficient evidence to accuse Juppe of organizing the placement of RPR staff with private companies. The potentially damaging charge that he profited personally from the jobs scheme has also been been dropped, leaving the central accusation that the former prime minister was guilty of "illegal taking of interests" by securing jobs for seven RPR staff members on the Paris city hall books.
Explanation
He is also, however, likely to be asked to explain how it was that his own private secretary, Claude le Corff, came to be paid in 1989 and 1990 by a private company in which she apparently never set foot.
The prosecution is also expected to home in on the case of Jerome Grand d'Esnon, a close Juppe adviser, who was hired as a communications expert by the city hall in 1991.
While he had an office, a secretary and a telephone line at RPR headquarters in the rue de Lille, his name did not even appear in the city hall telephone directory.
If the judge, Catherine Pierce, is really determined to establish Juppe's degree of personal responsibility, she is likely to ask him some potentially embarrassing questions about Chirac's role in running the party. Juppe has always insisted the president was never involved in such mundane matters as party financing.
The president, who has been named in half-a-dozen different corruption and malpractice scandals, was declared immune from prosecution -- and even from questioning -- by France's highest court last year as long as he remained in office. It would, however, prove a major embarrassment to the president if the court convicted Juppe, one of his most loyal and valued lieutenants.
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