FRANCE:A trial that opened in Paris this week illustrates that French justice moves in mysterious ways, writes Lara Marlowe
FRENCH JUSTICE moves in mysterious ways. Take Dominique de Villepin, for instance, the former prime minister.
He appeared to be in the clear but, yesterday, the Paris prosecutor's office said it wanted to try him for his alleged role in a smear campaign against French president Nicolas Sarkozy.
Villepin is under investigation on suspicion of leaking a fake list of people who received bribes in the Clearstream scandal, named after a bank in Luxembourg.
Sarkozy's name appeared on the phoney list at a time when he and Villepin were rivals to succeed President Jacques Chirac. Sarkozy said he wanted to see Villepin hanging from a meat hook.
Villepin left politics, became a lawyer and continued writing poetry and Napoleonic epics. He met Sarkozy at the Élysée Palace in June and again on September 5th. On Monday, Le Figaronewspaper - the bible of the French right - reported that Sarkozy told Villepin: "We must work together again."
There was speculation that Villepin would be offered a cabinet post in a reshuffle after the French EU presidency.
Then, wham. Villepin is hit with the news that he may face trial, a development his lawyer described as "surprising and incoherent", since the same prosecutor wanted to dismiss the case in June.
So what happened?
Did Sarkozy suddenly learn that Villepin was plotting against him?
In France, prosecutors are handpicked by the justice minister, who is chosen by the president. The ministry determines the course of an entire career, so ambitious prosecutors are careful not to cross politicians.
"Since Sarkozy was elected, he and his acolytes have clearly shown their determination to control the public prosecutors' offices," says a prominent judge.
"Rachida Dati [the justice minister] says: 'I am the prosecutors' offices.' The public prosecutors may open a preliminary investigation, then shut it down, as happened with Sarkozy's property deal in Neuilly."
Those named on the Clearstream list were alleged to have received bribes from the sale of six French frigates to Taiwan for $2.8 billion (€2.06 billion) in 1991. We know that $500 million was paid in commissions, but we'll never learn to whom. Two men who knew the details, Taiwanese Capt Yin Chin-feng and Thierry Imbot, the son of a former head of the French intelligence agency, DGSE, died after falling out of windows.
Judge Renaud Van Ruymbeke, who investigated the case for 11 years, dismissed it last week because the French government blocked him at every turn, on the grounds that the answers he sought were defence secrets.
An equally bizarre case has opened at the Palais de Justice this week and is set to run until March 5th, 2009. Forty-two defendants stand accused of arms trafficking, influence peddling and misappropriation of funds.
They are left wing and right wing, and include a former government minister, two former MEPs, the son of a former French president, a former prefect, a general, a magistrate who served in the national assembly, a best-selling novelist . . .
At the core of this judiciary can of worms, dubbed Angolagate, is the sale of $790 million worth of Russian surplus weapons to Angola between 1993 and 1998 by French billionaire Pierre Falcone and Israeli billionaire Arcadi Gaydamak. "Rest assured," writes Louis-Marie Horeau in the investigative newspaper Le Canard enchâiné: "The judges are not asked to determine whether it's criminal to fan a civil war. The tribunal will address far more serious problems: Did the arms dealers have the right authorisations? Were the seals stamped in the right place? Were the commissions and kickbacks declared to the revenue authorities? And, especially, were politicians on the take?"
French magistrates say only a tiny percentage of such cases come to light and that judicial reform intended to decriminalise white-collar crime means even fewer will be tried in the future.
While there is plenty of evidence of shady dealings in Angolagate, French media - and some of the defendants - make a plausible argument that the arms deals were exploited by then president Jacques Chirac to prevent the former interior minister, Charles Pasqua, one of the defendants, from standing against him in the 2002 presidential election.
Angolagate promises to be a colourful trial. Jean-Christophe Mitterrand, the son of the late president, who is accused of receiving $2.6 million for his services as an intermediary, told the court he lives with his mother Danielle and is penniless.
Falcone, who is married to a former Miss Bolivia, started his career selling snails and fruit juice and now claims to earn €4 million a year. Gaydamak has four passports and is standing for mayor of Jerusalem in the November 11th municipal election. He has refused to come to France unless he is promised he will not be imprisoned.
Falcone and Gaydamak allegedly bought old weapons from the former Red Army, doubled the price, and used the difference to pay off Angolan and French officials. The contract included 170,000 landmines - and a cynical promise to demine the country after the war.
But we may never get to the bottom of Angolagate. When he visited the petrol- and uranium- rich country in May, Sarkozy told his Angolan counterpart, José Eduardo Dos Santos, that it was "time to lift the misunderstandings of the past".
On July 11th, French defence minister Hervé Morin wrote to Falcone's lawyer, saying that since the weapons did not transit French territory, French law did not apply. Never mind about the hundreds of millions that transited the BNP Parisbas bank.
Dos Santos has given his friend Falcone the status of minister councillor with the Angolan mission to Unesco, so he can claim diplomatic immunity.
Meanwhile the Angolan government has hired a former president of the Paris bar to argue that the trial violates Angola's defence secrets.