PARIS, May 11 (UPI) -- The scandals surrounding French President Jacques Chirac offer the most dramatic example of inflation in modern times. Six years ago, investigating magistrates probing allegations of bribe-taking while Chirac was mayor of Paris were focusing on claims that he had been handed a suitcase containing the equivalent of $300,000 in cash.
Now the allegation is that Chirac has a secret bank account in the Tokyo branch of the Sawa Bank of Japan that contains the equivalent of $50 million.
The source for this is a senior intelligence official, Gen. Philippe Rondot, a star of the secret world who masterminded the arrest of Carlos the Jackal, the noted terrorist of the 1970s, and negotiated the release of French hostages from Lebanon and Iraq.
Chirac has grandly dismissed these allegations, which feature prominently in the French media, and which relate to a much wider scandal that involves secret accounts in Luxembourg's Clearstream Bank, the bitter rivalry between Chirac's two leading heirs, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin and Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, corruption in the defense industry and boardroom battles in the EADS corporation that makes the Airbus commercial jets.
"The Republic is not the dictatorship of rumors, the dictatorship of false accusations. The Republic is the law," Chirac declared, adding that he had every confidence in Prime Minister Villepin and had no intention of replacing him.
That remains to be seen. The Socialists, the leading opposition party in the National Assembly, have filed a motion of censure against the government for next week, and there is a slim but significant prospect that enough government supporters could abstain to make the vote on what the Socialists call "France's Watergate" into a very close thing.
Bear in mind that Chirac has never been cleared of the earlier allegations of bribe-taking while he was mayor of Paris. He managed to avoid trial by getting France's equivalent of the Supreme Court to rule, amid great controversy, that the president of the republic could not be expected to be distracted by criminal proceedings while in office. The prospect of the charges being formally filed once he steps down from the presidency had been a strong incentive for Chirac to remain in office, or at least to ensure that his successor as president be a good and loyal friend.
This latest scandal began 15 years ago, when France sold six frigates to the navy of Taiwan for a total sum of $2.3 billion, of which some 20 percent was said to be 'commissions,' and some of which was supposedly laundered through Clearstream, which the bank staunchly denies.
Two years ago, the magistrates doggedly pursuing the Taiwan investigation had a meeting with an old friend of Villepin named Jean-Louis Gergorin, who made some sensational allegations about leading politicians who had secret accounts at Clearstream, including Nicolas Sarkozy. Gergorin refused to go on the record, suggesting that some previous witnesses in the affair had died in mysterious circumstances. But within the week, the magistrates received a CD file that purported to contain the list of Clearstream's secret accounts.
Gergorin denies providing this, and the magistrates soon discovered that the list was faked. Gergorin, who had run the policy planning unit at France's Foreign Ministry, resigned Wednesday from his new job as vice president of the EADS defense and aerospace corporation, "in order to concentrate on my defense."
The affair became public last month when the magistrates searched the offices of the defense minister and of Gen. Rondot, evidently suspecting that the faked CD was part of a political plot to discredit Sarkozy, and that Gen. Rondot was mixed up in it. In Rondot's files, the magistrates found a memo of a meeting with the prime minister and Gergorin which read "Political stakes: Nicolas Sarkozy. Fixation with Sarkozy (re: conflict Chirac/Sarkozy)."
Sarkozy tried and failed to get his name cleared in a statement by Villepin, and the affair has worsened the already bitter rivalry between the two men, and has sent Villepin's approval ratings plunging down to below 30 percent; Chirac's are down to about the same level. By contrast, Sarkozy's approval ratings are above 50 percent.
The legal inquiries grind on, in the usual slow French way, and the main impact on the public seems to have been a widespread disgust with the way their ruling elite conducts its political feuds, along with a profound suspicion that corruption and money-grubbing reaches very high indeed in the French state.
The most likely beneficiaries of this scandal may not be the Socialists, who were in power at the time of the sale of the frigates and many of whose leaders are also named in the dubious CD, but the extreme-right Front National party, which has also benefited from growing concern over mass Muslim immigration after the countrywide riots by young Arabs last autumn.
The respected IFOP polling organization stunned France last month by reporting that 35 percent of French voters now thought that the Front National "enrich the political debate," and 34 percent think they are "close to the concerns of the French people." The Front's leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen, won almost 18 percent of the vote, his highest ever share, in the 2002 presidential elections, beating incumbent Socialist premier Lionel Jospin into third place.
Le Pen, a man once convicted of selling illegal tapes of Nazi marching songs and Hitler speeches, is elderly and ailing, but his movement is thriving, signing up new members at a rate of over 10,000 a week. If there is a serious prospect of his winning 35 percent of the vote, then his success in next year's presidential elections cannot altogether be ruled out, given the divisions among the moderate conservatives and the various factions of the Left.
One thing looks almost certain from next year's elections. Whoever wins the French presidency, whether Sarkozy or the attractive woman Socialist Segolene Royal or even Le Pen, it is unlikely to be a friend of Jacques Chirac. So whether or not there is a secret $50 million bank account in Tokyo in his name, France may finally find out the truth about the famous suitcase and about the man who has been their president for the past 11 years.
