April 6, 2001
There is a growing likelihood here that the Elysée will not escape the French judiciary's increasingly persistent inquiries into official corruption, all of which has an open or indirect African connection. The latest blow for President Jacques Chirac was news on 27 March that he had been subpoenaed by investigating judge Ralph Halphen in the long-running habitation aux loyers modérés (subsidised municipal housing) affair, which has dogged Chirac's Rassemblement pour la République party since 1993.
A combination of grace-and-favour luxury apartment gifts (including to Chirac's first prime minister, Bordeaux mayor and previously foreign affairs minister Alain Juppé), and alleged bribe-farming with HLM works contractors in the Paris area, have dogged the political Right for most of the past decade. Last week's arrival as new mayor of socialist Bertrand Delano‘, has further worried the presidency.
The African dimension to the scandal is that a key witness in future hearings will be former co-operation minister Michel Roussin. Moroccan-born Roussin, a gendarme and a Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure spook before getting la coopé under the Francois Mitterrand-Edouard Balladur cohabitation government of 1993-95, was questioned in 1994 about his role in taking backhanders from contractors on behalf of the municipality of which Chirac was then in charge. Stories abounded then, of personal meetings involving very large sums handed over in leather briefcases. Officially, Roussin was masterminding the devaluation of the CFA franc at the time.
This led to him having to resign in the middle of that year's Biarritz Franco-African summit, to the ill-disguised glee of Chiraquiens, who suspected him of having deserted their camp for potential 1995 presidential rival Balladur. Officials surrounding Mitterrand, who had a rough ride at the summit due to a combination of his terminal prostate cancer and media outrage over France's role in that year's Rwandan genocide, were apparently also delighted.
Roussin was again mise en éxamen (questioned) in December 2000, this time spending five nights in prison, but admitting nothing to the judges, according to friends. He is currently 'Monsieur Afrique' for the French employers' body Medef, and holds directorial positions within 'le pétit prince du cashflow' Vincent Bolloré's sprawling Franco-African business empire, and at Cogema, the French-based uranium and related-materials group with major interests in Gabon. His attitude towards the juges d'instruction this time round may be altered by the defeat of Chirac's dauphin at the Paris mairie, Xavier Tiberi, another rightist - in common with Chirac and Roussin - with strong African connections.
Tiberi, already in trouble over phantom voters and fictional jobs given to his high-profile wife, Xavií«re, has nothing left to lose where his relations with Chirac are concerned: whereas the President, known for a wide range of connections in Togo, Gabon, Senegal and elsewhere in the former Franco-African village, has an election to fight in 2002 against current prime minister Lionel Jospin, who has maintained an almost visible disinterest in involvement in France's personalised approach to African diplomacy in the past two decades. Jospin is backed up by foreign minister Hubert Védrine, who had what he regards as the misfortune to be Mitterrand's foreign policy advisor during the Rwanda catastrophe.
No-one at Matignon or the Quai d'Orsay wants to be anywhere near any judicial inquiries into Tiberi and Chirac's dealings for nearly three Parisian decades, largely due to the links to other African scandals still outstanding. Principal among these are the massive and increasingly complicated inquest into Elf-Aquitaine, led by the country's highest profile judge, Norwegian-born Eva Joly, and deepening media interest in the links between the Corsican Feliciaggi family and RPF head (and former interior minister) Charles Pasqua.
The Feliciaggis are the chief beneficiaries of the 1990s' explosion in card- and machine gambling, and horse-race betting in francophone central and west Africa. Pasqua - a fellow Corsican - is an old friend of the family.
Although the Elf scandal is regarded as an almost-purely Parti Socialiste (PS) related problem - yet another reason for PS leader Jospin to keep strictly away from African 'emirs' before the upcoming poll - the HLM and Feliciaggi questions are regarded as affecting many other French and African politicians, depending upon whether figures such as Roussin decide to talk.
This in turn depends upon what informal assurances they are given by various participants in the run-up to the French presidential elections. Which, since the disappointing performance by the Left in late March, has now started in earnest.
