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FORMER FRENCH president Jacques Chirac has been found guilty of embezzlement and violating public trust in a corruption trial.
The trial centres on the alleged creation of false City Hall jobs to source funding for Chirac’s conservative party during his tenure as the mayor of Paris from 1977 to 1995.
This is France’s first trial involving a head of state since WWII.
Chirac has been given a two-year suspended prison sentence, according to the Associated Press.
The judge presiding over the trial said earlier this year that the 79-year-old former president would not have to attend in person after a medical report submitted to the courts outlined Chirac’s memory problems. His wife has denied rumours he suffers from Alzheimer’s, but acknowledged he has been suffering problems related either to age or to a stroke he suffered in 2005.
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Memory problems? That sounds familiar!
Now which one of our lot had memory problems when it came to them being questioned!
(…But amazingly got their memory back, just in time to be able to write-up their autobiography! Eason’s might now have it in the fiction/comedy section!)
On mature recollection – I can’t remember !
Which ONE of our lot? There’s around 100+ of them in there now who don’t seem to be able to remember promises they made 10 months ago.
2 years suspended. Was the judge Irish?
If we went through our back catalogue of crooks in high office with the same diligence as the French…
“Violating public trust” as an offence – our overcrowded prisons would be bursting at the seams. Leaving aside the obvious from the previous regime, FG have yet to discipline Offaly Cllr Percy Clendennen, who was named by the revenue as a tax defaulter six months ago. (a ff cllr appeared on the list yesterday).
The French appoint their judges by a judicial panel made up of other judges. Here it’s through political cronyism.
You may be right!
So what do you guys think is appropriate for a 79 year stroke sufferer?
Me? I think the verdict was right. Justice was done, seen to be done and proper account was taken of the personal circumstances of the defendant.
I would ask for nothing more here.
Prison, that’s what’s right for him.
Let him die in jail
Illuminating !
Indeed Peter!
Spoken in a country where the worst fate for corrupt politicians is perhaps a few embarrassing moments in a money gobbling ten year tribunal that can’t even result in a criminal prosecution.
Ray Burke and Liam Lawlor were ailed and there can be no charges arising from Mahon until it is published
They were not jailed arising out of matters relative to their misdemeanours. The were jailed for withholding information
Agreed Liam Lawlor, however Ray Burke was convicted and sentenced for false tax returns. Your point is absolutely right and morally unarguable, but corruption, where one individual bribes or otherwise make an illegal payment to another,is almost impossiple to prove in a criminal prosecution. Corroborative evidence is extremely difficult to obtain. In the Chirac case, having received information from his political opponents, it was relatively straight forward to esablish that a fraud had occurred. The authorities could trace that real salaries were paid to phantom employees and that the money trail led to Chirac’s party.
Since the Al Capone conviction authorities all over the world have sought to deal with secretive crime and corruption through adjacent tax crimes.
Thanks Peter.
And of course Frank Dunlop done a year or so as well.
It’ll be your turn soon Bertie …..
I doubt it.
have your say