Perhaps the title of this post is wishful thinking on my part, but we shall see. From The Scotsman: Raid on spy’s home ‘reveals details of Chirac’s secret £30m pound bank account’.

LONG-STANDING rumours that the former French president Jacques Chirac holds a secret multi-million-euro bank account in Japan appear to have been confirmed by files seized from the home of a senior spy.

Papers seized by two investigating magistrates from General Philippe Rondot, a former head of the DGSE, France’s intelligence service, show Mr Chirac opened an account in the mid-1990s at Tokyo Sowa Bank, credited with the equivalent of £30 million. It is not known where the money came from, nor whether it is connected to various kick-back scandals to which Mr Chirac’s name has been linked over the past decade.

Last year, Mr Chirac “categorically denied” having a bank account in Japan.

The seized documents have been described by the magistrates as “explosive” and are believed to contain copies of the former president’s bank statements.

[...]

Claims of Mr Chirac’s secret nest egg first came to the attention of the French authorities in 1996 when his friend Shoichi Osada, a Japanese banker, decided to invest £500 million in France, so triggering a routine investigation by the DGSE, which is said to have stumbled upon the then president’s Japanese account.

Thrown into a panic, Mr Chirac is said to have summoned Gen Rondot in 2001 and ordered him to destroy all DGSE evidence of the account. Unfortunately for the president, the spy simply removed the notes and memos about the affair to his home, where they were seized in March last year by Mr d’Huy and Mr Pons. Since then, the judges have been discreetly pursuing an investigation, interviewing 20 intelligence officers about the affair.

Mr Chirac is reported to have struck a deal with Mr Sarkozy, whereby the latter will push through judicial reforms ensuring the ex-president escapes prosecution. However, the magistrates are expected to move before the reforms are passed this summer.

This is just the beginning of what Jacques Chirac needs to answer for, if you ask moi, but the path towards justice will likely be a long one, and may well have to await the decision of a Higher Arbiter.

…

Sarkozy may have made a deal to get Chirac off the hook for his malfeasance, but here’s hoping his own tenure as president will have better results for everybody. The editors of National Review, at least, are gushing over his choice of foreign minister:

The appointment of Bernard Kouchner as foreign minister of France calls for superlatives like “exceptional, incredible, original.”

Nearing 70 now, Kouchner has led a full and rewarding life. A gastroenterologist by training, he was the moving spirit that set up Doctors Without Borders, truly a life-saving organization. He has been a minister of health, and the U.N. civil administrator in Kosovo. He likes to say that he is on the side of the oppressed, and one reason for that is the fact that his grandparents were murdered in Auschwitz.

For a long time Saddam Hussein was a particular bete noir of his, and Kouchner condemned France for arming and trading with such a killer. Siding with President Bush against French President Jacques Chirac, he was almost alone in the French elite in backing U.S. intervention in Iraq, and gloried in emphasizing that he was right.

A Socialist, he campaigned for Sérgolène Royal in the recent presidential elections, and said harsh things about Nicolas Sarkozy. Sarkozy surprised everyone by picking him, but the Socialists surprised nobody by straightaway throwing him out of the party. More superlatives may soon be in order.

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