Paris - President Jacques Chirac of France was under pressure yesterday to call a truce in a potentially catastrophic feud with Mr Lionel Jospin, his Socialist Prime Minister, by coming clean about past covert funding operations.
Mr Patrick Devedjian, a close adviser to the president and spokesman for Mr Chirac's conservative RPR party, said Mr Chirac should admit publicly that all political parties used to have illegal slush funds. This ended after the early 1990s, he maintained.
Mr Devedjian's call for openness came after several days of mud-slinging prompted by the videotaped confession of an RPR official, now dead, directly implicating Mr Chirac in a vast party financing racket while he was mayor of Paris from 1977 to 1995.