Prosecutor demands trial for Villepin for slandering Sarkozy

Oct 7, 2008, 10:57 GMT

Paris - The public prosecutor's office of Paris on Tuesday demanded that former French prime minister Dominique de Villepin stand trial for slander, the internet site of the daily Le Figaro reported.

Villepin, who was the diplomatic pointman of France's opposition to the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, is suspected of involvement in a complex scheme allegedly hatched to discredit French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

The so-called Clearstream Affair dates back to 2004, when Sarkozy's name appeared on a list of 800 people and companies allegedly holding accounts at the Luxembourg-based financial clearing house Clearstream.

The list suggested that Sarkozy, among others, had a foreign bank account into which illegal funds had been channelled via Clearstream.

However, an investigation in 2006 revealed that the list was bogus, raising the question of who sent the list and why.

The investigation ultimately determined that the list had been sent to French magistrates by a close friend of Villepin's, Jean- Louis Gergorin, a former top manager in the European aerospace conglomerate EADS.

The argument by the prosecutor's office that Villepin should be tried in the affair suggests that enough evidence exists to show that he had knowledge of the slanderous list, which was supposedly compiled to ruin Sarkozy's chances for the 2007 French presidential election, which he won.

The two judges leading the investigation are not bound by the prosecutor's demand and could decide that the evidence does not warrant a trial.