PARIS — Nicolas Sarkozy has never made any bones about his love
of money. The very evening of his election in 2007, he made
straight for one of the most fashionable and expensive watering
holes on the Champs Elysées — no Ben’s Chili Bowl, this — to
celebrate with similarly money-minded pals. He later told a
biographer, with evident pleasure, that among the French
president’s perks came no fewer than five bona fide chateaux
staffed with butlers and maids awaiting his eventual arrival. The
wealth, luxury and privilege that have gone with France’s top job
for millennia, whether monarchy or republic, were his.
Unabashedly enjoying them, Sarkozy looked like a kid in a
candy shop with an unlimited allowance: vacations on friends’
luxury yachts, courting an Italian model, jetting around the
world with a large retinue in tow, reinstating presidential
hunting parties for favorites and VIPs à la French kings of yore.
“President bling-bling,” the French dubbed him, not altogether
affectionately. He set the tone for his administration. In this
country where sex is freely discussed but money is a taboo
subject, that tone said, “Forget your hang-ups about it, money is
okay.” If Gaullism in the 1960s meant a prickly sense of national
pride, Sarkozysm in the early 21st century has come to mean that
making money, spending money, flaunting money is acceptable, even
for public servants. Easy come, easy go!
Cabinet members duly followed suit. When the
secretary of state for overseas development couldn’t find a
convenient Air France flight to a meeting in the Caribbean, he
simply rented an executive jet for $145,625 of taxpayer money.
One minister wasn’t satisfied with the single official Paris
apartment the government generously provides its high officials,
so he simply took two of them. Another thoughtfully gave
relatives the keys to hers, complete with personal valet and
chef. When the junior minister for sports visited South Africa
for the World Cup, she booked a luxury hotel suite at $750 a
night. The secretary of state for the Greater Paris Region, fond
of fine Havana cigars, spent $15,000 on them from the public
purse. Under Sarkozysm, why not?
Ordinary French citizens, asked to tighten their belts
during the economic crisis, were increasingly shocked as these
things came to light. But at least no one accused the Sarkozy
administration of outright corruption.
That changed this week as the long-running Bettencourt
Affair took a surprise twist. No longer was this merely your
ordinary, everyday family squabble between 87-year-old Liliane
Bettencourt, heiress to the $20 billion L’Oréal cosmetics fortune
— the world’s 17th richest person and France’s biggest victim in
Bernie Madoff’s scam — and her estranged daughter over a few
masterpiece paintings, an island in the Seychelles, and a billion
or so in secret bank accounts. The daughter, Françoise
Bettencourt-Meyers, sued a celebrity photographer who had
befriended Bettencourt mère, accusing him of conning her
mother out of $1.25 billion.
Enter a long-serving butler who, disliking what he heard in
conversations between Madame Bettencourt and her chief financial
adviser, secretly recorded them. The 20 hours of recorded talk
revealed much more than the fraught relationship between mother,
daughter, and photographer. The adviser and Bettencourt are heard
discussing $97 million stashed illegally in foreign accounts.
Even more titillating, he mentions that he had hired a certain
Florence Woerth to help with her investments.
When the 28 computer disks were handed over to police and
leaked to the press, Paris ears pricked up. Woerth? As in Eric
Woerth, Sarkozy’s former budget minister? The long-time treasurer
and chief fundraiser for Sarkozy’s UMP party? Could there be a
conflict of interest involving France’s wealthiest woman and a
government minister charged with cracking down on tax evasion
while seeking funds for the governing party?
Woerth’s wife quickly resigned her job and Sarkozy ritually
declared complete confidence in Woerth, now labor minister in
charge of pushing through France’s needed pension reform. The
minister himself, until now considered the administration’s Mr.
Clean, insisted everything he had done as budget minister and
party treasurer was “transparent… clean… clear.” There had been
no tax breaks for Bettencourt, even though she was known to have
given liberally to the party.
Then the plot thickened. Last Tuesday Bettencourt’s
discontented former accountant blew the cover on years of alleged
systematic cash payments to politicians. Including, she claimed,
to party treasurer Eric Woerth for Nicolas Sarkozy.
Claire Thibaut, the bookkeeper who worked on Bettencourt’s
accounts for 12 years until 2008, claims that one day in the
spring of 2007, the financial adviser asked her to provide
$188,000 in cash for Sarkozy’s campaign. (French law prohibits
cash contributions to individual politicians of more than $5,750
a year.) Since her weekly withdrawal limit at the bank was a mere
$62,500, she turned over what she could and he withdrew the rest
from Bettencourt’s secret accounts. The adviser denies
this.
“Totally false,” Sarkozy’s spokesman retorted with unseemly
haste at the unusually early hour of 8 a.m. But the president has
refused to comment on the allegations except to deplore that the
French public, for some reason, seems more interested in “smears”
than in things like pension reform. While he remains bunkered in
the Elysée Palace, the biggest crisis of Sarkozy’s presidency is
growing like a lowering thunderhead.
Panicked cabinet members are circling the wagons, accusing
the inquiring press of “an ignominious campaign” and “fascist
methods.” A prosecutor has opened an investigation into the
allegations, which for obvious reasons are virtually impossible
to prove. The French know they can’t count on such
investigations, under the thumb of Sarkozy’s loyal justice
minister, to come up with the unvarnished truth. Whatever the
inquiry’s result, it’s unlikely to alter the poisonous prevailing
climate, with two out of three voters considering French
politicians “mostly corrupt.”
Meanwhile Sarkozy, his poll numbers now at a record low 26
percent, is making gestures at reining in some of the more
egregious spending. He canceled the traditional Bastille Day
garden party at the Elysée Palace, along with the presidential
hunts at Chambord chateau. Henceforth ministers will travel by
train when possible, and their budgets will be trimmed by 10
percent. The number of official limousines will be reduced by
10,000, leaving a niggardly 60,000 cars in the fleet. State
asceticism can only go so far, naturally. The new $221 million
presidential airplane Sarkozy has ordered up, complete with
office, meeting room, bed room with double bed, large bath, and
medical center — known by some as
Sarko One — will be delivered as scheduled.
The sacrosanct July-August vacation season has saved French
governments in the past, notably during the riots of 1968. The
Elysée is playing for time, with Sarkozy not expected to address
the nation before July 13. “The situation is getting more
difficult as days pass,” says one political pollster. “These very
public scandals are eroding Sarkozy’s credibility. Maybe the
summer recess will cool things down.” Maybe, but right now we’re
having a heat wave.
