EU in crisis: Letter links Chirac to party pay fraud

A FRENCH judge has uncovered written evidence which directly links President Jacques Chirac with the misappropriation of public cash to fund his party, the RPR, six years ago.

The evidence, in the form of a letter signed by Mr Chirac, while he was mayor of Paris, could lead to a heated legal and constitutional debate. Can a French president be formally investigated or prosecuted while in office? One constitutional body has already pronounced - without being asked its opinion - that he cannot

Embarrassingly for Mr Chirac the question may now have to be argued in public before the country's highest appeal court, within the next few months. The three-year-old investigation of the existence of up to 300 "fictitious employees" on the payroll of the Paris town hall in the early Nineties has been creeping closer to the President for more than a year.

It is alleged that the phantom officials were actually working full-time for the neo-Gaullist RPR, then campaigning to make its president - Mr Chirac - President of France.

The latest twist of the saga, leaked yesterday to the newspaper Liberation, could not come at a more damaging time for the President. He is being linked, in effect, to frauds more serious and systematic than those which forced the resignation of the European Commission earlier this week.

The investigating judge, Patrick Desmure, is said to have assembled considerable evidence that the RPR was staffed by people paid by the taxpayers of Paris. He has already started a formal investigation of the former prime minister, Alain Juppe,who was a senior official in both the town hall and the RPR at the time. Mr Juppe faces possible charges of embezzlement and illegal use of public funds.

There has been previous evidence, including a scribbled note on a Juppe letter, tenuously suggesting that Mr Chirac - as both mayor and head of the RPR - knew what was going on. But there has been no direct evidence, no"smoking gun".

Liberation says judge Desmure now has a copy of a letter signed by Mr Chirac in December 1993. In the letter Mr Chirac, as mayor, recommends the promotion, just before retirement, of a town hall official, Madeleine Farard, to improve her pension rights. So far, perfectly above board. However, Mr Chirac goes on to say that Ms Farard earned this bonus because of her "exemplary devotion" and "delicate duties" working with Jean-Claude Pasty, now a Euro MP, then on the agricultural staff of the RPR. Ms Farard's brief was to "maintain good contacts with agricultural organisations" - hardly a priority for the City of Paris - but a crucial electoral constituency for a party with a strong rural base.

In effect, the letter suggests, for the first time in documentary form, that Mr Chirac was well aware of the staffing of the RPR with city "employees".

The Elysee Palace refused to comment yesterday.

According to the newspaper Le Monde yesterday, the judge Desmure has formally sought a ruling from the public prosecutor's office in Nanterre in the Paris suburbs. If the judge is given approval to investigate Mr Chirac, the issue would probably go before an appeal court and then the supreme appeal court, the Cour de Cassation.

If the prosecutor and judge decide, on constitutional grounds, not to investigate the President, a Green MP intends to lodge an appeal process through the same courts.