Nicolas Sarkozy has paid back more than €14,000 to the state after it emerged that personal and family bills were put through the Elysee Palace accounts. The expenses came to light in the first state audit of a French leader’s spending since Louis XVI just before the French revolution.
The report, published yesterday by France’s national auditor, acknowledged Sarkozy had paid back €14,123 in personal bills from 2008. The nature of the costs was not revealed and Sarkozy had asked for the receipts to be returned to him. The auditors said he had not known the expenses went through palace accounts.
On official spending, Philippe Seguin, the national auditor, questioned €400,000 worth of opinion polls commissioned by the palace without proper tendering, and some of which ended up in the press or on TV.
More attention needed to be paid to making different food suppliers bid for contracts. The Elysee has used the same butchers since 1969 without looking around for better value.
The company that regularly supplies marquees for the presidential Bastille day garden party was hired again last year despite charging 50 per cent more than another bidder, and the presidential palace had spent around €3,000 on fines for late payment of electricity and gas bills.
The audit also questioned travel costs, noting that when Sarkozy made personal trips he caught commercial flights. However, officials who have to travel with him at all time, claimed their tickets back on expenses and in the meantime an empty state plane always followed the president wherever he went in case he had to return to France in an emergency.
The accountants also took issue with the maintenance and gardening bills for three official country residences which are hardly used. The bills amounted to €1.76 million. One of the residences, Souzy-la-Briche, has not been used since Francois Mitterrand stepped down as president in 1995.
After a row over a 140 per cent pay increase when he took office, Sarkozy set an annual Elysee budget, of around €110 million, for the first time last year in a bid to distance himself from previous presidents such as Jacques Chirac who had no fixed rules. – (Guardian service)