PARIS One day after President Jacques Chirac called his government to order, demanding that ministers focus on their jobs rather than the political scandal that has dominated headlines here for weeks, a senior French defense executive ruined hopes for a lull by admitting that he had written an anonymous letter at the heart of the affair.The revelation by Jean-Louis Gergorin, published Thursday in an interview in Le Parisien, is the latest piece of the puzzle in an apparent smear campaign against Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy and many others. Chirac and Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin both face suspicions of targeting Sarkozy, their chief rival, ahead of presidential elections next year.
But Gergorin, a former vice president of the aerospace giant EADS who has known Villepin for 25 years, denied that Sarkozy's name was on a list of 70 bank accounts that was apparently forged to link several high-profile people to kickbacks from a 1991 defense contract.
In an extensive interview following days of speculation about his role in the scandal, Gergorin said that it was he who first told Villepin about the list of bank accounts in January 2004. That prompted Villepin, who at the time was foreign minister, to call a three-way meeting with a retired intelligence official, whom he asked to investigate the list.
Gergorin admitted that four months later, he anonymously sent the list to the judge investigating the kickbacks for fear that the first investigation would take too long. He said he had met the judge, Renaud Van Ruymbeke, in several confidential meetings in March and April 2004 but refused to formally testify. Both sides agreed to transfer the information in an anonymous letter, he said.
According to Gergorin, Sarkozy's name only appeared on a second list, which he obtained from someone he identifies only as "the source," but who in French press reports is widely suspected to be a former EADS computer specialist, Imad Lahoud.
Ruymbeke received the second list in the mail in June 2004, with references pointing to Sarkozy. In his interview Gergorin refused to comment on the second letter and others that followed, though without explicitly denying that he sent those as well.
"About all the letters that followed, I reserve my information and analysis for the judges," Gergorin told Le Parisien.
While Gergorin's revelations appear to establish the identity of the mysterious informer, key questions remain. The most crucial one was formulated by Ruymbeke, in his testimony before the two other judges investigating claims of defamation in the affair on behalf of Sarkozy and others on the list: "Who falsified the bank accounts and with what objective?" he asked in the testimony, published Thursday in Le Monde.
Following weeks of leaks from confidential testimony and confiscated material, key witnesses in the scandal now appear to openly bypass the judicial system in a case that has been characterized by its public nature: Gergorin's interview comes after the retired intelligence official conducting the first inquiry gave his version of the story to Le Journal du Dimanche, published Sunday, and declared that he would not testify before judges again.