A FORMER aide to Jacques Chirac and Dominique de Villepin has accused the French former president and prime minister of receiving $20 million in secret cash payments from African leaders to finance election campaigns.
Robert Bourgi, a long-time intermediary between French governments and their ally regimes in Africa, said he “took part in handing over several briefcases to Jacques Chirac in person, at Paris city hall” when the future president was mayor in the 1980s and 1990s.
He said the donations were “never less than five million francs” (more than €750,000), and that he gave Mr Chirac and Mr de Villepin about $20 million in total between 1995 and 2005.
Mr Bourgi’s incendiary claims, made in a radio interview yesterday and due to appear in a new book later this week, prompted Mr Chirac and Mr de Villepin to issue firm denials.
Both said they would sue for defamation against the Lebanese lawyer, whose extensive contacts in France’s former colonies earned him the nickname “Mr Africa”.
He abandoned the Chirac-Villepin camp in 2005 to work alongside Nicolas Sarkozy, whom he still advises.
Mr Bourgi said the cash system was put in place by Jacques Foccart, an adviser on Africa to Gen Charles de Gaulle and later Jacques Chirac.
After Mr Foccart’s death in 1997, the system was maintained by Mr de Villepin, who was chief of staff at the Élysée Palace at the time.
He alleged that in the lead-up to Mr Chirac’s successful run for the presidency in 2002, five African leaders – Abdoulaye Wade (Senegal), Blaise Compaoré (Burkina Faso), Laurent Gbagbo (Ivory Coast), Denis Sassou Nguesso (Congo-Brazzaville) and Omar Bongo (Gabon) – attended a meeting in Mr de Villepin’s office, where they handed over about $10 million to fund the campaign.
According to the lawyer’s account, the practice ended in 2005, when Mr de Villepin summoned him to his office and said: “The money from Sassou, Bongo, all the Africans, smells of sulphur. It’s over.”
He claimed he then approached Mr Sarkozy, who was “shocked” at the sums involved and invited Mr Bourgi to work for him, “but without the system of funding by briefcase”.
A different version of events is recounted by another former Chirac adviser, Michel de Bonnecorse, who is also quoted in the new book. He said Mr Bourgi continued to “beg” on behalf of Mr de Villepin and Mr Sarkozy – then engaged in a fierce battle for the presidential nomination – until 2006.
After Mr de Villepin’s exit from the race, “instead of distributing a briefcase to each, he only made one – a bigger one – and put it at the feet of the interior minister”, referring to Mr Sarkozy.
“The return on the investment was immediate,” Mr de Bonnecorse added, pointing out that Mr Bongo of Gabon was one of the first heads of state invited to the Élysée Palace by Mr Sarkozy.
Confirming Mr Chirac’s intention to sue, his lawyer Jean Veil said it was “suspect at the very least, if not scandalous, that Mr Bourgi waited until President Chirac was incapable of defending himself to relieve his delicate soul of this heavy burden which seems to have weighed on his conscience for years”.
Mr Chirac’s trial for misuse of public funds began in his absence last week after the former president was deemed mentally unfit to attend.
The Bourgi claims, for which he offered no proof, came just three days before a verdict is due in an appeal in the Clearstream case, a long-running saga in which Mr de Villepin was accused of orchestrating a smear campaign against Mr Sarkozy when the pair were angling to succeed Mr Chirac. Mr Villepin was acquitted last year, but he prosecutor appealed.
“The accusations he [Mr Bourgi] makes are serious, scandalous, with details worthy of any bad thriller,” Mr de Villepin said on television.
He queried the timing of the allegations and suggested they were “a smokescreen” aimed at forcing him not to stand in next year’s presidential election, when he could eat into Mr Sarkozy’s centre-right vote.
“They’re trying to dissuade me from standing. They have been trying to put a spoke in the wheels for years, but I have a tough skin,” he added.
Senegal “categorically” denied the claims, a presidential spokesman told the AFP news agency, while a former deputy to Laurent Gbagbo said “there was a transfer of money” from the capital Abidjan to Paris in 2002.
Mr Gbagbo was removed from power earlier this year after France sent in it its military on the side of his rival Alassane Ouattara.
Top intermediary in colonial network
IN THE opaque networks behind France’s relationships with its former colonies in Africa, known in Paris as la Françafrique, Robert Bourgi has for decades been one of the most important middlemen.
His official status has always been unclear, but his bulging contacts book and access to the highest echelons of power in Paris and African capitals such as Abidjan (Ivory Coast), Dakar (Senegal) and Libreville (Gabon) made him an influential figure.
Portrayed as heir to Jacques Foccart, who managed Charles de Gaulle’s network of contacts in Africa, the Lebanese lawyer fulfilled a similar role for Jacques Chirac before pledging allegiance to Nicolas Sarkozy when he seemed destined for the Élysée Palace. Despite Sarkozy’s election promise to dismantle the informal networks of la Françafrique, he remains in favour.
Intermediaries such as Mr Bourgi sell their influence. “I work both for African presidents and for the French president,” he said.
“I’m not an adviser, more missus dominicus [Latin for “envoy of the ruler”], but I never travel without informing Sarkozy or Guéant,” referring to Sarkozy’s former chief of staff Claude Guéant, who is now interior minister.
“He doesn’t run French policy in Africa, but he sometimes says things we could not say,” former development minister Alain Joyandet said. Joyandet once recalled how Bourgi walked in and out of Gabonese president Omar Bongo’s office without knocking.
When Bongo died, it was Bourgi – not the state of Gabon – who announced it. He then campaigned for Bongo’s son, Ali, to succeed him. “In Gabon, France does not have a candidate, but Robert Bourgi’s candidate is Ali Bongo,” Le Monde quoted him saying. “I have Sarkozy’s ear. In a subliminal way, the voter will understand.”
Legal woes of protagonists
THE THREE protagonists in the allegations made by Robert Bourgi – President Nicolas Sarkozy, his predecessor Jacques Chirac and former prime minister Dominique de Villepin – have each been the subject of serious claims in the past year.
On Thursday, Mr de Villepin will learn the outcome of an appeal into his acquittal last year in the Clearstream trial.
The long-running case, with a thriller-worthy plot that included spies, secret bank accounts and the sale of frigates to Taiwan, centred on accusations that Mr de Villepin was involved in a scheme in which forged documents would be used to damage Mr Sarkozy when both men were manoeuvring to succeed Mr Chirac as president.
Having enjoyed immunity from prosecution as president, Mr Chirac last week became France’s first postwar president to be tried on criminal charges when hearings began into claims – denied by Mr Chirac – that he created fake jobs for party officials during his 18 years as mayor of Paris. The 78-year-old was deemed mentally unfit to attend the trial.
For Mr Sarkozy, the Bettencourt party funding scandal has been a constant headache for more than a year. A former bookkeeper to the L'Oréal heiress Liliane Bettencourt said she prepared envelopes full of cash for visitors to the Bettencourt home and that Mr Sarkozy was a regular visitor. Last week, the government acknowledged that the secret service spied on a Le Monde journalist to trace the source of his stories on the Bettencourt affair. The paper claims this broke laws on phone-tapping and freedom of the press. Ruadhán Mac Cormaic