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Former French PM may face charges over Sarkozy smear

Former French prime minister Dominique de Villepin could face charges for his part in an alleged smear plot against President Nicolas Sarkozy, his lawyers said on Tuesday.

De Villepin was forced to return early from holiday last week when his Paris home and office were raided by judges investigating whether he had schemed to damage his rival's reputation and wreck his presidential ambitions.

De Villepin issued a statement on Tuesday saying he had been summoned for further questioning at the end of this month by judges who were considering placing him under official investigation. The alleged smear campaign laid bare the poisonous feuding inside former president Jacques Chirac's government, with Chirac and his protege de Villepin at loggerheads with Sarkozy.

Sarkozy triumphed, using the scandal to portray himself as a victim of high-level skulduggery.

The so-called Clearstream affair dates back to the summer of 2004. An anonymous source wrote to a judge accusing a number of politicians and businessmen of holding secret bank accounts with a Luxembourg bank, Clearstream. The accounts were said to hold kickbacks from the US$2.8 billion sale of French frigates to Taiwan in 1991.

On the list was Sarkozy, the then finance minister. Paris braced itself for the corruption scandal of the decade. But the judge established that the accounts did not exist.

Sarkozy said the affair had been used to discredit him and last year lodged an official complaint with magistrates, saying he had been the victim of a smear campaign.

Judges are assessing whether senior members of the government prolonged the bogus corruption scandal, using intelligence officials in a deliberate plot to spread rumors about Sarkozy and destroy his reputation.

De Villepin was a minister at the time the scandal broke, and says he was simply fulfilling his duties to check rumors of wrongdoing by a Cabinet colleague.

His statement on Tuesday said he acted "strictly in accordance with his duties as foreign affairs minister and [then] interior minister and denies any criminal involvement in this case."

De Villepin was questioned by judges for 17 hours last December.

The search of his apartment and fresh summons for questioning come after new evidence was unearthed in the memory of a computer belonging to an intelligence chief.
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