French President Nicolas Sarkozy filed a legal complaint on Thursday against a former national intelligence boss, following the publication of diaries packed with alleged details about Sarkozy’s personal life.
The complaint, filed with the Paris prosecutor on Thursday, charges Yves Bertrand and others with invasion of privacy, malicious accusation, forgery and use of forgery and concealment, said Sarkozy’s lawyer, Thierry Herzog.
Bertrand was director of the powerful Renseignements Generaux spy agency for 12 years until 2004. His diaries from this period were seized by judges recently as part of an investigation and extracts were published in Le Point news magazine last week.
Judges asked to see the diaries in the framework of a probe into a campaign to smear Sarkozy before his election as president.
The extracts published in Le Point reported rumors concerning the state of Sarkozy’s marriage to his second wife, Cecilia. The couple divorced last year. They also included details of alleged shady financial dealings involving Sarkozy.
“Yves Bertrand has leaked ‘information’ concerning the private lives of others, which is an invasion of privacy, and by putting these things in writing in his notebooks, he has fraudulently tampered with the truth with the indisputable intention of harming others,” Herzog said.
Bertrand told TF1 television the diaries were not intended for publication, but simply as a record of rumors circulating about senior politicians.
“It’s just a rough notebook, it’s nothing official. It was stolen, it was taken. It had been sealed and everything, but it’s not my fault if someone stole things,” he told the television station by telephone.
The Paris prosecutor recommended last week that former prime minister Dominique de Villepin stand trial over suspicions he had a hand in the campaign to discredit Sarkozy.
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