[A-List] France: adieu, Juppé?

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

Chirac's party chief set to be tried over fake jobs fraud

Jon Henley in Paris
Thursday December 5, 2002
The Guardian

French judicial sources said yesterday that Alain Juppé, the newly elected
head of President Jacques Chirac's ruling centre-right party, the UMP, was
"highly likely" to be charged and tried early next year for his role in a
vast fake jobs fraud at the Paris town hall.

Mr Juppé, a former foreign minister and prime minister from 1995 to 1997,
ran the capital's finances during much of Mr Chirac's stint as mayor from
1977 to 1995 - a period during which the president allegedly orchestrated
half a dozen illegal financing schemes for his party at the time, the RPR.

The president himself is immune from prosecution as long as he remains in
office.

Taking all the scandals together, nearly 50 of his aides, RPR colleagues and
business friends - including Mr Juppé and Michel Roussin, Mr Chirac's
right-hand man at the town hall - are either awaiting trial or one step away
from being charged.

Mr Juppé, who was the general secretary and president of the RPR during the
period in question, has been under investigation since 1998. The affair
allegedly saw dozens, possibly hundreds, of RPR party activists and
favour-seekers paid salaries of up to £30,000 a year by the Paris town hall
for non-existent jobs. Investigators claim that most were really working
full-time for the RPR.

The judicial sources said the fate of the former prime minister now appeared
to have been sealed by testimony given to the investigating magistrate by Mr
Roussin in October.

For the first time during questioning, Mr Roussin, apparently trying to save
his own skin, named Mr Juppé as responsible for at least one of the fake
jobs - that of Noredine Cherkaoui, a former RPR youth secretary who was paid
by the town hall from 1991 to 1996.

"The fact that Juppé has been directly named by a key witness means the
magistrate cannot but include him among the 30 or so to be put on trial,"
one judicial source said.

"The case is now closed and a court date should be set very early in the New
Year, probably for before Easter."

One of the president's closest and most trusted allies, Mr Juppé was elected
the head of the UMP at the party's founding congress on November 17, a
position from which many observers say he would be ideally placed to launch
a strong presidential campaign in 2007.

"He's extremely unhappy at having to carry the can," a member of Mr Juppé's
entourage told Le Parisien newspaper. "He knows very well a trial would be
the end of his presidential ambitions, and a conviction would be the end of
his political career."