France was transfixed Monday by a growing political scandal bringing together a disgraced former finance minister, the tax problems of fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld and a videotaped accusation from the dead fingering President Jacques Chirac.
The affair, with its claims of influence-peddling among the Paris elite and dark hints of blackmail, shed an unflattering light on the workings of power in France, and threatened to add further to the already widespread disrepute of the country's leaders.
In addition to Chirac, whose name appeared in the original allegations last week about fraud at Paris city hall, the scandal was edging closer to his rival, Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, who in three years of office has successfully maintained his government's reputation for probity.
The latest twist came Monday when Chirac issued a statement asking Jospin to launch an urgent enquiry into how a videotape implicating him in illegal party funding came to be in the hands of former Socialist finance minister Dominique Strauss-Kahn.
On Sunday, Strauss-Kahn had admitted being in possession of the video cassette, after a news magazine claimed that he had acquired it in 1999 in return for using his influence as minister to bring down Lagerfeld's massive tax bill.
The affair centers on the confession of a late party fixer in Chirac's RPR, Jean-Claude Mery, who in 1996, while facing charges for corruption, made a secret videotape outlining a kickback operation that channeled millions of francs into party coffers in the 1980s.
In the tape, transcripts of which were published in Le Monde newspaper last Thursday, he claimed that Chirac as RPR mayor of Paris personally connived at the scheme and was present at a meeting in 1986 when Mery handed over five million francs (770,000 euros, 677,150 dollars) in illegal contributions from building companies.
Chirac angrily denounced the charges as "manipulation," and questions were immediately asked about how and why the tape had suddenly reappeared a year after Mery's death.
The president's supporters raised suspicions of a plot to discredit him at a time when elections are beginning to loom, and when Jospin's popularity has plummeted following the oil protests of earlier this month.
The bombshell came late Sunday with a report on the website of L'Express magazine, which claimed to have had access to statements made to examining judges by a key witness in the affair, tax lawyer Alain Belot.
Belot arranged the recording of Mery's confession four years ago, L'Express reported. Detained on Friday and asked where the original of the tape was, he told the judges he had handed it over last year to Strauus-Kahn, then finance minister and Socialist party heavyweight.
"In return, the lawyer asked for a tax arrangement for one of his most famous clients, Karl Lagerfeld. The designer was facing an enormous tax bill of 300 million francs. The tax authorities in the end brought it down to 50 million," L'Express said.
Contacted by AFP, Strauss-Kahn -- who resigned last November in a separate scandal -- confirmed that he had the cassette, but denied he had ever watched it and said he had even forgotten where he had put it.
He also said that while the cassette had been handed over during a meeting in which Lagerfeld's tax arrangements were discussed, there was no connection between the two.
The pressing questions Monday were: what was Strauss-Kahn intending to do with this potentially explosive piece of evidence? And why did he not hand it over to the judicial authorities, who were investigating the allegations of illegal funding at the RPR?
Under pressure to explain how much he knew of the affair, Jospin said that the first he knew of the video's existence was when Le Monde published its story last week -- PARIS (AFP)
© 2000 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
