Sarkozy's France: wiretaps, brown envelopes - and never any regrets

As a shrewd student of political history and keen judge of the French pulse, he will probably consider the current accusations against him as merely light skirmishes, writes Anne-Elisabeth Moutet

Sarkozy's game plan for 2012, in other words, was never to refashion himself as the country's ideal son-in-law, but as the safest pair of hands in difficult times Photo: PATRICK HERTZOG/AFP/Getty Images

By Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, Paris

8:07PM BST 03 Sep 2011

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It was a first for a French president: an apology, gracefully expressed, in front of the Cabinet, the Speakers of the House and Senate, and a roomful of French officials.

France, said Nicolas Sarkozy, had far too long supported authoritarian regimes that had very little to do with her core values. He himself had been "part of this". But no longer. The time had come to make morally exemplary choices.

This was Dr Jekyll-Sarkozy at his best, commenting on French foreign policy in the light of Gaddafi's fall for his traditional annual conference with French ambassadors from around the world. (The French don't apologise. Like the ancient Romans, they think owning up to a mistake is a fatal admission of weakness)

But don't expect this new, fresh approach to be extended to domestic politics, and especially to the skein of old scandals rising up this past week to encumber Mr Sarkozy as he prepares for the eight-month trek to the 2012 Presidential contest.

The two-year-old affaire Bettencourt has come to haunt him and his party again, with fresh allegations of illegal financing of his 2007 campaign by the L'Oréal heiress.

There have also been claims of Secret Service wiretaps on the mobile phones of a Le Monde investigative reporter and the co-author of a new book titled Sarko Killed Me.

The book is compiled of interviews with 27 personalities – ex-ministers, civil servants, television presenters, MPs, a number of journalists – who claim presidential displeasure cost them their career, reputation, or simply the favour they once enjoyed at the Elysée.

Prominent among them is an investigating magistrate, Isabelle Prévost-Desprez, who was removed from the Bettencourt case.

She tells of accusations, from two witnesses, that Liliane Bettencourt once gave Nicolas Sarkozy cash in a brown paper envelope – but says those were relayed outside of a formal interrogation, and therefore she did not include them in the record of her own official inquiry. (The one named witness, a former nurse working for Mrs Bettencourt, denied all yesterday.)

The general feeling in Paris is that Ms Prévost-Desprez claims raise more questions than they answer.

"Why then did she not re-interrogate her witnesses?" asked budget minister Valérie Pécresse: It's a valid question, given that investigating magistrates have notoriously extended powers in France – Eva Joly, who made her name in the 1980s and 1990s as a tough investigating judge in corporate corruption cases, did not hesitate send witnesses to jail to "soften them up", including the chairman of oil giant Elf.

The claims of Secret Service wiretaps, however, may be more of a problem.

The Interior Minister, Claude Guéant, a close Sarkozy associate and former Elysée chief of staff, was quick to answer that nobody's telephone was actually eavesdropped, but admitted that security services requested records of calls to the Le Monde journalist, Gérard Davet, in order to seek the source of a Ministry of Justice whistleblower who'd leaked records on the Bettencourt case.

The whistleblower, who was demoted and sent to an obscure civil service posting in Cayenne, French Guiana, isn't protected by law, but journalistic sources are, in deference to a recent 2007 law passed by ... Nicolas Sarkozy.

Overall, it doesn't yet look as if the current accusations have yet reached the danger stage for the French president.

They will, however, form part of the Opposition general counter-attack after Nicolas Sarkozy's unexpected run of luck in the past few months.

His good fortunes include not just France's role in the Libyan victory, and the baby son his wife Carla Bruni is expecting in October, but also the disappearance of his toughest rival, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, after his arrest on suspicion of suspicion of sexually assaulting a New York chambermaid.

A deeply polarising figure, Sarkozy was never elected because the French liked him.

Soon nicknamed the "bling-bling president" for his love of Rolex watches, Ray-Ban aviator sun-specs, thick cigars, holidays on friendly tycoons' yachts, and trophy wives, he was seen as the "President of the rich" after a very first budget that limited to 50p the top tax rate.

It didn't help either to be nicknamed "the American" for his eagerness to rejoin Nato, his considered support for presidents Bush and Obama, even his habit to jog in a NYPD tee-shirt given him by Rudy Giuliani.

The French prefer their leaders, from Louis XIV to de Gaulle, to stay icily aloof: Sarkozy's populist manner, four-letter-word use, and short temper did him no favours.

They did, however, respect his courage, believing that he would not shy of making hard reforms after his predecessor Jacques Chirac avoided any kind of social conflict for twelve years.

Sarkozy's game plan for 2012, in other words, was never to refashion himself as the country's ideal son-in-law, but as the safest pair of hands in difficult times.

As a shrewd student of political history and keen judge of the French pulse, he will probably consider the current accusations against him as merely light skirmishes, which will be forgotten soon.

He knows the French despise money, are overall tolerant of sexual hijinks as long as they're consensual, and are forgiving of a degree of political dirty work. (To this day, the most popular president of the Fifth Republic after de Gaulle remains François Mitterrand, despite the fact that he ordered over 5,000 illegal wiretaps in order to conceal his natural daughter and parallel family.)

Unlike most male politicians, Sarkozy has already understood the one great change in the electorate, wrought by the DSK affair – French women voters will no longer tolerate sexism.

That's why he immediately dropped his junior minister and suburban mayor Georges Tron, when Tron was accused of foot fetishism with his female City Hall employees, whom he pressured into allowing him to give them massages. (Tron is now the object of two separate criminal lawsuits.)

He also knows that for centuries the French accepted their government's need to keep a watchful eye on the citizens: until a year ago, there was a police department known as the Renseignements Généraux, or RG, whose business it was to compile dossiers on any person of note in the country, so that the government would not be wrongfooted if "notables" suddenly found themselves in the spotlight.

(Le Monde recently published some sizzling 2007 RG records on Dominique Strauss-Kahn's visits to swingers' clubs and to prostitutes in the Bois de Boulogne.)

Few people in France believe that because the RG were abolished in name, there doesn't remain some police unit somewhere, in charge of knowing who's doing what where.

As for losing the favour of the president when you do something he doesn't like, that's the way the country has been run since the Middle-Ages, and is perfectly familiar to anyone here employed either in the civil service, or in the notoriously top-down French corporate world.

Meanwhile, the last thing Nicolas Sarkozy plans to do is to apologise.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/nicolas-sarkozy/8739805/Sarkozys-France-wiretaps-brown-envelopes-and-never-any-regrets.html

© Copyright Telegraph Media Group & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 2011

Nobody expected this French revolution

The pensions row has turned into a referendum on Sarkozy, says Anne-Elisabeth Moutet.

Riot police officers during clashes with youths in Lyon Photo: AP

By Anne-Elisabeth Moutet in Paris
8:51AM BST 21 Oct 2010

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As the French Autumn of Discontent morphs into its second week (more trains, fewer planes, long lines at petrol stations, banlieues kids indulging in a bit of self-administered wealth redistribution in the streets), no one can predict how things will turn out for Nicolas Sarkozy and his embattled government. And yet this should have been the easiest reform of his first term.

The government was looking to score points for realism and for shoring up the pay-as-you-go pensions system. Instead, they have boxed themselves into the kind of standoff the French always used to call, scathingly, la politique à la Thatcher.

The Socialist opposition, hoping to energise grassroots support for their 2012 presidential campaign, encouraged their natural constituents, the teachers' and students' unions, to stoke up anti-Sarkozy resentment in schools and universities. Now they find themselves watching in dismay as the student revolt spirals out of control. If there is a single fatality in these heated confrontations, they will be branded irresponsible, and the same parents who encouraged their children to demonstrate will withdraw every ounce of goodwill and support.

Both sides were taken by surprise. Over the past months, in negotiations quietly undertaken at the Elysée Palace, union leaders had indicated that they understood the pensions quandary. On paper, simple arithmetic sums it up: in 1945, when the scheme was established, eight workers paid for the pension of one retiree. By 1960, they were down to four. Today, it's 1.8, and if nothing changes, in 15 years' time, 1.2 French workers will bear the burden of one pensioner.

The unions were prepared for the usual French face-saving social kabuki: after some pre-planned tactical retreats, a bit of symbolic give and take on implementation, a few exceptions made for women and manual labourers, the bill would have been accepted. Instead, they have been pushed into a hard line stance by their members. The CGT union's Charles Foulard, the oil-and-gas industries' answer to Arthur Scargill, is leading the blockage of Total's oil refineries; he's constantly on radio and television exclaiming that reform is unfair because the French have it too hard already.

One of the great no-nos in France is criticising the right to strike. Worker solidarity is professed with Young Pioneer unanimity. You can complain about anything else – but there's a logical disconnect that obtains before you can suggest that the three hours you spent commuting home, packed into the train like a sardine, are actually due to the collective irresponsibility of unsackable public sector workers. And so what is emerging is a kind of surly Gallic Blitz spirit, with morning radio news giving tips on petrol stations still open, and the SNCF iPhone app showing cancelled trains in real time.

Politicians always learn too late, to their cost, that perception is reality. By all practical measures, we French actually live a pretty good life. The social welfare system works, with generous unemployment benefits and tax rebates; the national health system is the one thing no French citizen complains about (this translates into Europe's longest life expectancy and the World Health Organisation's highest score); and public infrastructure spending ensures good services even in problem areas. This we take for granted.

All the same, the strikes have turned into a referendum on Nicolas Sarkozy – not his actual policies, so much as his style. The perception is that he panders to the rich, an unfair one when you consider his predecessor Jacques Chirac, who never paid for any holiday he took in or out of office (Chirac still relies on an array of benefactors, from luxury goods tycoon François Pinault, to the family of the late Lebanese premier Rafik Hariri, who pay for his splendid flat by the Louvre).

Sarkozy (whose fortune is the product of selling his family flat for £1.6 million when he was elected in 2007) earned himself, early on, the "bling bling president" tag. Nothing he has done since has shifted the impression that he wants the French to make efforts he will not subject himself and his rich friends to.

The fact is, if the pensions reform fails (for now, the government intends to stand firm, and a parliament vote is expected next week), it won't have been seen off by the unions, but by the Bettencourt scandal. The fight between the l'Oréal heiress and her daughter uncovered casual tax evasion on a large scale, and illegal contributions made to Sarkozy's presidential campaign. The sheer amounts quoted as the saga unfolded – a Seychelles island here, pictures by Matisse and Picasso there – awakened revolutionary feelings not felt in two and a half centuries. Against the spirit of Robespierre, no amount of reason can prevail.

The only hope for the government is an especially French one: at the end of next week, All Saint's Day marks the start of the half-term holidays. It is expected that most young demonstrators will choose to break their revolt to go and enjoy that other French inalienable right, and the fires will dwindle and die.

© Copyright Telegraph Media Group & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 2010

The L'Oreal heiress and a picture of rudeness

François-Marie Banier's enemies will be watching the novelist's difficulties with glee, writes Anne Elisabeth Moutet.
Published: 5:27PM BST 16 Jul 2010

Francois-Marie Banier arrives in court for L'Oreal fraud trial Photo: Rex Features

By the time most of you read this on Saturday, François-Marie Banier, the society photographer and novelist, will have been grilled for 48 hours solid by the French police, without the benefit of a lawyer. They want to know, among other things, whether he evaded tax by hiding, through a Liechtenstein trust, the gift of a Seychelles island (estimated at 500 million euros) from the L'Oréal heiress, Liliane Bettencourt.

The procedure is known as garde à vue, and it's as unpleasant as it sounds (France is regularly taken to task about it by the European Court of Human Rights, and regularly blows, in answer, an elegantly argued raspberry in Strasbourg's general direction).

Banier's Left Bank townhouse has also been raided by magistrates, in search of proof of tax evasion, money laundering, and possibly conspiracy to defraud a person "in situation of weakness". He has denied it, of course.

But a number of people must be watching the proceedings with unmitigated glee. There's Françoise Meyers-Bettencourt, the heiress's only daughter, who started the whole thing three years ago when she felt her mother was being estranged from her by the entourage.

Many members of Liliane Bettencourt's staff actively loathed Banier, not least because he was extremely rude to them. He would call before taking Liliane out, one of them told the police, reminding them "to make sure she had her chequebook with her".

But there are also family members of the many prominent elderly ladies (and a few gentlemen) he paid court to in the past decades, who tell surprisingly similar tales of suddenly not being able to visit or telephone them, of works of art suddenly vanishing from a wall or a chimneypiece, of property in prime locations – a studio near Paris's delightful Place de Fürstenberg, a flat on rue Servandoni – being gifted or sold at peppercorn prices to the enterprising artist.

Frédéric, the grandson of interior designer Madeleine Castaing, a kind of French Elsie de Wolfe, recalls appropriations physical and moral – beyond the Chaim Soutine pictures and Cocteau and Picasso autograph letters and the rue Visconti flat, what galled him most was a black and white photograph taken by Banier of his grandmother, aged 95, dishevelled in a nightgown and without her trademark wig, which ended up in various retrospectives across Europe's museums. Banier could become rough when refused a prized possession, Frédéric Castaing told the police. "He shouted at her and once urinated in her teacups, in front of her staff ".

Banier, it is said, learned his shocking rudeness from Salvador Dali. The great Surrealist painter would receive him, still in his teens, in his suite at the Meurice hotel, and graphically comment on the supposed physical attributes of the waiters serving them tea. "Banier wants to shock, he only manages to be embarrassing," wrote Pierre Bergé, Yves Saint Laurent's longtime partner, after a 10-day holiday in Toulon. Still, Banier managed to get Princess Caroline of Monaco to pose for him with her head shaved, and the notoriously skittish Isabelle Adjani to make monkey faces to his camera. More recently, he has photographed, and made friends of, Johnny Depp, Kate Moss, Caroline's daughter Charlotte Casiraghi.

You have to admire his aplomb. Visiting a gallery with Liliane Bettencourt, he freezes in front of a picture. "The colour of our friendship is the precise blue of this Matisse," he exclaims. On cue, the billionaire heiress replies, "François-Marie, this picture is yours."

This week, just before he was taken for questioning, Banier gave a long interview to L'Express, shooting salvoes at his detractors. "Of course I can't influence Liliane Bettencourt," he protested. "I advised her to buy Cheval Blanc, the Premier Cru vineyard; Ilford, the British photographic company; [the ailing daily] Libération; a museum; a skyscraper for L'Oréal's new headquarters. She did none of it. How can anyone possibly think I manipulate her?"

© Copyright Telegraph Media Group & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 2010

Nicolas Sarkozy scandal goes back to Hungarian roots

The case of L'Oréal heiress, Liliane Bettencourt, has enraptured France and forced Nicolas Sarkozy into the spotlight. By Anne-Elisabeth Moutet in Paris.

Published: 8:00AM BST 11 Jul 2010

French photographer and author Francois-Marie Banier explaining his works to Liliane Bettencourt (L) at Hans Lange Museum in Krefeld, Germany Photo: EPA

Before becoming a scandal about money, politics, art, history, café society and power, the Affaire Bettencourt, now threatening the Sarkozy presidency, is the story of two ferociously ambitious young Hungarian outsiders and their success at storming the citadels of the French establishment.

One, Nicolas Sarkozy, the son of a womanising émigré aristocrat and a doctor's daughter, used to be told by his (twice) remarried father on visiting Sundays that he would never amount to anything much in France, because of his foreign name, small stature and below-average school grades.

The other, François-Marie Banier, né Banyiaï, was regularly beaten by his Renault migrant worker turned ad-man father for being a dilettante, an aesthete, and a high-school drop-out. (By coincidence Pál Sarkozy, Nicolas's father, also dabbled in advertising for a while).

Mr Sarkozy has mentioned the slights he suffered as the least well-off boy of his chic school in Neuilly, Paris's richest suburb. Mr Banier neglected even to complete his baccalauréat, haunting luxury hotel lobbies from his teens on, becoming in rapid succession the favourite of such luminaries as the painter Salvador Dali, the Nobel-prize playwright Samuel Beckett, and the couturiers Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Cardin. The Communist poet Louis Aragon enthused about the first novel Mr Banier published, aged 22.

Mr Sarkozy came to the attention of Charles Pasqua, the Gaullist party stalwart and key power-breaker who was to help shape most of his career, with his first public speech at a national rally: he was just 20 at the time.

Today Nicolas Sarkozy is president of the French Republic, while François-Marie Banier, a polymath photographer, painter and novelist, has recently been ranked 917th richest individual in the world, having accepted fabulous gifts from a string of wealthy old ladies, ranging from the viscountess Marie-Laure de Noailles to the actress Silvana Mangano - and especially from his latest patron, Liliane Bettencourt, the 87-year-old L'Oréal heiress.

The two men, no longer so young (Mr Banier is 63, Mr Sarkozy 55) nor as pretty as they both once were, stand at each end of a glittering chain of achievements, events, relationships, networks and rivalries now threatening to engulf France in the kind of political meltdown not seen here since the 1930s.

Mr Sarkozy's poll ratings, already dire, have plunged to ominous lows, with fewer than 32 per cent saying they still trust him. The latest projections are that the 2012 presidential race wil be won by the lacklustre Socialist leader, Martine Aubry, who in a second-round run-off against Mr Sarkozy would win 52 per cent of the vote.

But that's only if the second round is a traditional contest between Right and Left. Other, more worrisome, figures show that French public opinion holds politicians of both main parties in equal contempt, with only the Front National's Marine Le Pen showing a strong improvement in her rating, albeit still behind the others.

If that trend isn't reversed, France could see a repeat of 2002, when the Front National won second place in the first round of presidential voting, allowing its leader - Ms Le Pen's father, Jean-Marie - to challenge Jacques Chirac in the second round.

All French scandals are complicated (they're never about something so depressingly simple as sex), partly because they hide within layer upon layer of secrets in a country which has never believed in transparency.

"Pour vivre heureux, vivons cachés" (To be happy, live hidden), a maxim of the 18th-century poet Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian, remains a byword here.

The political revelations of L'Affaire Bettencourt came out almost by accident. Françoise Meyers-Bettencourt, Liliane's daughter, 57, brought to court a case against Mr Banier, whom she accuses of abusing her elderly mother's trust to gain favour - specifically, being showered with gifts of cash and artworks.

This was three years ago, soon after the death of her father, Mrs Bettencourt's husband, André. (She may have feared that her newly-widowed mother was dangerously unmoored; after Bettencourt's death there was talk of Mr Banier being adopted by Liliane.)

The case dragged on. The daughter tried to prove that her mother's mind was befuddled. The mother refused a psychiatric evaluation, countering that her daughter was jealous of Mr Banier, who was "more amusing, more interesting" while Françoise was "dull" and had "no conversation."

Mrs Bettencourt's worth is estimated between 17 and 20 billion euros. "If you can afford it, it's very nice to be able to be generous," she recently said in a television interview.

If it wasn't for the Monopoly money amounts (993 million euros given to Mr Banier over four years in the form of Matisses, Picassos, life insurance contracts and a Seychelles island), it would look like every mother-daughter bitter feud, writ large.

Still handsome and elegant today, Liliane Bettencourt was for decades one of France's great society beauties. (The stylised woman painted in the early 1960s by the celebrated illustrator René Gruau, to figure on the golden cans of L'Oréal's best-selling Elnett hairspray, was modelled after Liliane. The hairspray container is unchanged today, an example of timeless design.) Françoise Meyers-Bettencourt, not to put a fine point on things, is rather plain.

Liliane's adored father Eugène Schueller, the founder of the L'Oréal fortune, was a notorious Collaborationist, who financed a number of fascist parties in the Thirties, was a Vichy regime enthusiastic supporter, and paid for the exfiltration to South America of some French Nazis at the Liberation.

Françoise married the grandson of Neuilly's Résistant rabbi, who died in Auschwitz.

Liliane Bettencourt's help – her butler, her secretary, her accountant, her driver – started taking sides. Those who showed too much favour to Françoise (or didn't hide their distaste for Banier, an increasingly frequent, often rude visitor) were fired. With compensation, but fired.

As it turns out, this was a spectacularly bad decision. The family's butler had started taping the conversations taking place in the expansive neo-Art deco Neuilly house, where Mrs Bettencourt has lived since commissioning it in 1951. (This is very much a tale of Neuilly, a kind of French South Kensington where the residents voted against having a second Métro line extended from Central Paris, because it would bring petty crime to their doors. Not long after that vote, Nicolas Sarkozy was elected Mayor, aged 28.) This was, the butler said, because he felt his boss was being taken advantage of.

Upon getting the sack, the butler went to Françoise (a mere 50 yards away, in a house almost as grand) and gave her a computer memory card containing the recordings, made on a tiny machine hidden on the drinks trays. (The Liliane-Banier camp counter that Françoise paid him all along to make them).

Three weeks later, Françoise handed 28 CDs of the recordings to the police. For good measure, she also gave them to an investigative website and a news magazine, which published very long excerpts. One can't but assume she had listened to them. Did she realise the conflagration they would trigger?

The recordings were dynamite. Not so much because, at times, Mrs Bettencourt did sound forgetful and hazy about the whereabouts of her immense fortune (she had, for instance, completely forgotten about two Swiss bank accounts containing over 100 million euros) and how much of it she'd given Mr Banier - but more because of the personalities and doings of her chief financial adviser and her lawyers.

Patrice de Maistre, the head of her "family office," a Jockey Club member, is heard advising her on where to hide large amounts of money from the French taxman (Singapore is in, now that Switzerland has become leaky). He boasts of having hired the then-Budget Minister Eric Woerth's wife, herself a former Rothschild banker, "to oblige him" - although he also badmouths Mrs Woerth, "who really puts on airs, playing too much the minister's wife."

Mr de Maistre angles to be given (tax-free, in Switzerland) a 60-foot sailing boat. He drops a few unsavoury comments about John Elkann, Gianni Agnelli's grandson, who is Jewish ("isn't it typical how they always gravitate to money?" he laughs, which Liliane interrupts with "I'm absolutely not anti-Semitic").

And he explains how cheap it is to contribute officially to a French politician's campaign, since individual gifts are capped at 7,500 euros. ("They are so grateful, and it really isn't much at all.")

In other recordings, lawyer and money manager discuss on their own how best to prevent Banier from getting even more. It makes for a riveting read – and a rare bird's eye view of the vernacular of France's super-rich, where tax evasion and influence-currying come naturally.

Having the wife of then minister in charge of tax employed, at the very least, in a place where fraud took place, was bad enough. How much did she know? asked the predictable headlines.

Worse was to follow. The usually tame French press took the bit between their collective teeth, and in the intervals between clamouring for Mr Woerth's resignation from his current job as labour and social affairs minister (a key post since he's in charge of pushing through Mr Sarkozy's great pension reform), went digging.

Soon, Mediapart, the investigative website, found another fired employee, an accountant, who blithely told how for years she collected large wads of cash from Mr and Mrs Bettencourt's bank to give to politicians in brown envelopes – most recently 150,000 euros to Mr Sarkozy's presidential campaign in early 2007.

The accountant was subsequently harshly grilled by the police and seemed to withdraw some of her accusations (she had been told by Mr de Maistre who the money was for, but had never actually seen it given out), then recanted her recant. Meanwhile the bank balances did show withdrawals for the various amounts she'd mentioned at the given dates.

"This proves nothing!" Mr Sarkozy's supporters and assorted lawyers roared. But by then it was of course too late – the general impression of cronyism and corruption was disastrous, compounded by the stonewalling, in time-honoured fashion, from the Elysée. (Earlier in the month, two cabinet ministers who'd abused their expenses in an unrelated polemic had to step down, which was seen as too little, much too late.)

Mr Sarkozy won't go and can't be investigated, because of the same presidential immunity that so often shielded Jacques Chirac. I wouldn't put good money on Mr Woerth staying, even though the current wisdom at the Elysée is that he is necessary to the pensions law, and that if he steps down Mr Sarkozy's most emblematic reform, on which he was hoping to be reelected, is toast.

But it's increasingly obvious that we have reached a paradigm shift, where the old Chirac saw, "Never admit to anything, never answer on anything", finally no longer applies in France.

The French, from a unique, centuries-old mix of Catholic and Marxist distrust hardwired in their collective psyche, have always despised money and mistrusted the rich.

At the very time when he is asking for belt-tightening and rallying together, Mr Sarkozy, the bling-bling president of the early days, the outraged victim of the Clearstream smear campaign, appears himself finally to have stepped over the line.

© Copyright Telegraph Media Group & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 2010