(Image source: Encyclopædia Britannica)
BY MIKKEL NOEL LANZKY
ANCHOR CHRISTINA HARTMAN
A Paris court has found former two-term French President Jacques Chirac guilty on corruption charges. BBC News gets us up to speed.
“The 79 year old was found guilty of paying his friends and allies with public funds between 1977 and 1995, while the mayor of Paris. In effect he’d used the civic payroll to support his own election campaigns. For collusion, embezzlement, and abuse of power he was handed a two year suspended sentence, escaping jail but shamed nonetheless.”
As mayor of Paris, Chirac created a score of fictitious public employees positions and rerouted the salaries to the coffers of his party. That may sound serious, but according to CNN, Chirac’s standing in the public’s eye is not going to suffer much.
“The fact is that over the last 20 or 30 years there have been a lot of prosecutions of all the parties here in France for what was pretty much common practice a few decades ago. Basically the parties were using people who were employed on the public payroll, they were using them as party operatives.”
A professor of French at the University of Copenhagen shares this thought, telling Danish newspaper Politiken:
“Most Frenchmen will shrug their shoulders at this. They will think that it has always been so in France. As long as the politicians don’t put the money in their own pockets, it is almost seen as idealistic that they support their party.”
Still, as The Guardian notes, the prosecutor says the verdict is a milestone.
“Above all, this sends a strong message to politicians and to all those in positions of power who think they could behave in the same way, with impunity. It’s a historic decision, even though he has been found guilty while no longer president. He was nonetheless the president of France.”
Chirac didn’t make an appearance during the trial. He suffers from health complications after a stroke in 2005. The former French minister for foreign affairs, Alain Juppé (Ah-Lahn Schyp), has already been convicted for charges stemming from the same case.
Transcript by Newsy.
