Chirac rival accused in 'smear campaign'

The French Finance Minister, Nicolas Sarkozy - the man likely to supplant President Jacques Chirac as the dominant figure on the French right - appears to be the object of a Kafkaesque attempt to smear his reputation.

The French Finance Minister, Nicolas Sarkozy - the man likely to supplant President Jacques Chirac as the dominant figure on the French right - appears to be the object of a Kafkaesque attempt to smear his reputation.

Since May, a French investigating magistrate has received from an anonymous tipster two letters and two CDs packed with the names of officials and politicians who allegedly shared in multimillion-euro kickbacks from a sale of French frigates to Taiwan in 1991.

Three of the names are well-known. One is explosive, that of M. Sarkozy. Unusually on the French centre right - he has never been involved, or whispered to be involved, in any financial scandal.

Investigators say that there is "not half a fact" which seriously connects M. Sarkozy - or the three other senior politicians - to the byzantine frigate deal worth €2,400m (£1.63bn), at least one third of which has gone missing.

In 1991, the left was in power in France. M. Sarkozy was the 38-year-old mayor of a rich Paris suburb and a rising figure in M. Chirac's neo-Gaullist party, the RPR. (The two men have since fallen out dramatically over M. Sarkozy's all-but-declared ambition to be the next president in 2007.)

There is no serious reason to imagine that M. Sarkozy could have been involved in the doubtful transactions surrounding a frigate sale by a Socialist-led government 13 years ago. Nonetheless, the investigating judge, Renaud Van Ruymbeke, thought it necessary to check the serial numbers of secret bank accounts in Luxembourg and elsewhere, listed on the CDs, including one in Italy allegedly belonging to M. Sarkozy. Many of the numbers proved to belong to genuine accounts, although the banks refused to divulge who operated them. The judge has issued international warrants asking for the names of the owners of the accounts.

All of this information was contained in a mysterious article which appeared, buried at the bottom of page 12, of the newspaper Le Parisien last Friday. Officials told the French news agency AFP that the anonymous letters and CDs, received since May, were now thought to be probably a "manipulation", in which genuine facts and lies were bundled together.

The CDs contained more than 1,000 names in all, including those of senior officials and police officers, as well as the four former ministers: the former Socialist finance minister Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the leftist-nationalist former interior minister Jean-Pierre Chevènement, the liberal former finance minister Alain Madelin and M. Sarkozy. All four have angrily denied any connection with the frigates. On a trade mission to Moscow, M. Sarkozy described the allegations as "grotesque".

The strong suspicion is that the real target is M. Sarkozy. For more than a year, he has been engaged in a political wrestling match with M. Chirac, 71. He has made it clear that a younger man - preferably himself - should be the standard-bearer of the centre right in the next presidential election.

Earlier this month, the pair agreed an uneasy truce, allowing M. Sarkozy to become president of M. Chirac's new party, the UMP, from November, so long as he accepted quietly that he must resign as Finance Minister. At the time that the anonymous tips were sent to the judge, however, the two men were locked in merciless political combat. There is, however, no evidence to connect M. Chirac or his supporters to the anonymous correspondence with the judge.