A PUBLIC prosecutor has ordered a preliminary investigation into allegations that France’s richest woman secretly funded Nicolas Sarkozy’s presidential election campaign.
The news has added to pressure on Mr Sarkozy’s embattled government after a simmering row over links between the L’Oréal heiress Liliane Bettencourt and conservative politicians turned into a crisis which ministers were straining to keep under control yesterday.
The prosecutor’s intervention followed allegations by Ms Bettencourt’s former accountant, Claire Thibout.
In statements to police and media, Ms Thibout said she had withdrawn €50,000 to be given to current labour minister and UMP party treasurer Éric Woerth as part of an alleged €150,000 cash donation for Mr Sarkozy’s 2007 campaign. She said she did not witness the handover but was told of it.
French law says private donors can only give a maximum of €7,500 a year to a political party.
Ms Thibout also claimed Mr Sarkozy was one of a number of politicians who would visit the Bettencourt home in Neuilly-sur-Seine and leave with an unmarked envelope. An aide to Mr Sarkozy has rejected the claims as “totally false”.
Mr Sarkozy has dismissed the claims as a smear and yesterday urged cabinet colleagues to “keep their sangfroid”, while Mr Woerth said he had initiated defamation proceedings over the allegations.
Faced with an onslaught of opposition criticism, prime minister François Fillon, flanked by leaders of both houses of parliament, ruled out an early cabinet reshuffle and accused the media and left-wing opponents of stoking populism and damaging democracy. Mr Woerth, the quietly spoken minister who finds himself at the centre of the storm, gave an emotional television interview in which he dismissed calls for his resignation and insisted he had done nothing wrong.
He denounced the “outpouring of hatred” against him and said he was the victim of “a political cabal orchestrated by the Socialist Party”.
“I never, never received a single illegal euro,” the minister said, his voice quivering with anger. “Everything is false. It’s defamation.”
Mr Woerth, whose steady performance in government had prompted speculation that he could become prime minister, has been under scrutiny for the past fortnight because his wife worked for the company that managed Ms Bettencourt’s fortune, and the couple’s names emerged in tapes secretly recorded by Ms Bettencourt’s former butler.
The tapes also suggest the 87-year-old heiress was seeking to evade taxes.
Ms Woerth recently resigned from her position, and the couple have denied any conflict of interests.
Despite isolated calls for Mr Woerth to resign, the president seems determined not to lose his minister charged with steering the government’s contentious pension reform through parliament.
Budget minister François Baroin said he expected to receive a report tomorrow from finance ministry inspectors on Mr Woerth’s role in Ms Bettencourt’s tax affairs, which the government expects will clear him of any impropriety.
In the meantime, ministers were mounting a counterattack against their critics. Mr Fillon called the Bettencourts’ former accountant “an anonymous witness who tells the media more than she tells the police and doesn’t produce a shred of evidence”.
Earlier this week, Socialist and Communist deputies walked out of parliament after a centre-right minister accused the opposition of “playing the game of the extreme right” by repeatedly raising the allegations during a question-and-answer session.
There were signs, however, that some members of the ruling UMP bloc doubted whether Mr Woerth could withstand the pressure and remain in his job.
"Nicolas Sarkozy is the only one who believes Éric Woerth can hold on," a senior UMP figure told Le Monde.