Former French president Chirac charged with embezzlement

PARIS -- Former president Jacques Chirac was formally charged with embezzlement Friday, joining a growing list of sitting and former senior French officials accused of abusing power to raise political funds or further their careers.

The series of malfeasance cases -- also involving former prime minister Dominique de Villepin and former interior minister Charles Pasqua, among others -- have pulled back a curtain on the backrooms of French politics, depicting powerful figures engaging in an unseemly mix of high finance, arms marketing, dirty tricks and personal vendettas in the tapestry-draped palaces of official Paris.

Pasqua, 82, a combative senator who battled German occupation troops as a teenager, was convicted Tuesday of peddling influence to an Israeli arms dealer and sentenced to a year in prison. Also convicted in the arms sales case was Jean-Christophe Mitterrand, son of the late president François Mitterrand and one of his advisers on Africa. He was given a two-year suspended sentence and fined half a million dollars for taking commissions to put businessmen in touch with Angolan leaders in connection with the arms sales.

Villepin, a silver-haired former diplomat and Chirac protege, was put on trial last month over allegations that he allowed circulation of a falsified list of illegal bank accounts that included the name of President Nicolas Sarkozy, who was Villepin's main political rival. After a six-week trial, the court said it would issue a verdict in January.

Villepin, meanwhile, has used the publicity of his trial to relaunch his political career, hinting that he might run for president against Sarkozy in 2012. He attributed the case against him to Sarkozy's desire for revenge, saying the president had vowed to "hang me by a butcher's hook, and the promise has been kept."

Sarkozy, who rose to prominence under Chirac, has not been ensnared by the various court proceedings, although he joined in bringing charges against Villepin. But his government, as political heir of the leaders charged with malfeasance, seemed likely to end up tarred in some measure by the apparent confirmations of a long-anchored public perception that corruption is rife in France's corridors of power.

Against that background, political figures from the left as well as the right questioned whether it was wise to prosecute Chirac, 76, the first former or sitting president of France's Fifth Republic to face such criminal charges. Sarkozy declined to comment.

Ségolène Royal, the Socialist candidate for president in 2007, said the former president had a right to peace and quiet in his retirement and suggested that hauling him before a judge at this point "is not good for France's image, even if he deserves it." Xavier Bertrand, who heads Sarkozy's Union for a Popular Movement, which descended from Chirac's neo-Gaullist political party, said, "It is not useful to go back on things again and again."

After a long inquiry, Investigating Magistrate Xavière Simeoni recommended a trial for Chirac and many aides on charges of misappropriating public funds and abusing public office while he was Paris mayor from 1977 to 1995.

A statement issued by Chirac's office said, "President Chirac takes note of this decision as a defendant like any other. He is serene and determined to establish before the court that none of the jobs that remain contested constitutes a fictitious job."

Accusations of fictitious employees at Paris City Hall have swirled for several years.

As president from 1995 to 2007, Chirac was immune from prosecution. He lost that right when he retired on Sarkozy's election.