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French press review 18 June 2013

French former president Nicolas Sarkozy dominates two of this morning's front pages, and each of the stories concerns money, buckets of the stuff.

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Le Monde looks at the Tapie affair, a saga arguably longer and more complex than War and Peace.

Bernard Tapie is a businessman. To summarise, very roughly, Bernie sold the sports company Adidas in 1992, using the bank Crédit Lyonnais as his agent. He subsequently learned that the bank had made a handy little packet on the side, but had forgotten to tell him about it. Like any self-respecting, enraged, and robbed, businessman, Bernie sued.

That put him in conflict with the republic, since the state was a shareholder and, when the Crédit Lyonnais started leaking like a straw boat, France did what governments do with struggling banks . . . they bailed it out. Which left them in a head-to-head legal battle with Mr Tapie.

When Nicolas Sarkozy's government came to power in 2007, a decision was taken to use fast-track arbitrators and the reason given was a wish to bring a speedy end to a case which was costing the state a lot of money. Three such referees were named and the end result was that Bernard Tapie was awarded 403 million euros. Ball burst, game over.

Except that there is now more than a nagging suspicion that at least one of the three referees was perhaps slightly biased in favour of Mr Tapie, and there is the allied suspicion that several people in high places . . . the then Finance Minister, now chief botlle-washer at the IMF, Christine Lagarde for one, former Interior Minister, then president, Sarkozy for another, knew that the "independent" panel to decide the Tapie affair was not quite up to the job.

A judge is now poking his well-trained nose into the whole simmering pile, to determine if the case does not deserve to be investigated under the terms of a law disallowing the formation of gangs for the purposes of fraud.

By the time the dust eventually settles, this may make War and Peace look like holiday reading.

The other mention of our man Sarkozy is on the front page of right-wingLe Figaro, where the money belongs, or belonged, to Lilliane Bettencourt, the L'Oréal billionairess who might have been a bit generous in cash supplements to needy would-be presidents. All of that is being sifted under other well-trained legal noses.

Now, however, the French equivalent of the chief justice says there's a possibility that the magistrates driving that investigation might not, themselves, be sufficiently impartial to continue to work on the case.

They have been guilty, says the chief justice, of "unquestionably polemical" remarks about the former president. And polemical is something you just don't want your investigating magistrates to be. Unquestionably.

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