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.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
RSS