Before him, there had been VGE and the Bokassa diamonds, François Mitterrand and the Urba affair. After him, there was Nicolas Sarkozy and the Bettencourt business. Jacques Chirac, who died Thursday at the age of 86, also had trouble with the law. Europe 1 refreshes your memory.
The fictional jobs of the RPR
Between 1988 and 1995, wages of permanent employees of the Rassemblement pour la Republique (RPR) were taken over by private companies and the Paris City Hall, which will entail in particular the condemnation to 14 months of suspended sentence and one year of ineligibility of Alain Juppé. As founder of the RPR and mayor of Paris, Jacques Chirac was also targeted by this affair. In December 2011, he was sentenced to two years in prison suspended for "embezzlement of public funds", "breach of trust", "illegal taking of interests" and "crime of interference".
HLM of Paris
In order to finance the RPR, the city council of Paris would, from 1977 to 1995, grant public contracts of construction of HLM to companies in exchange for bribes. If the case was discovered in 1994, it is the revelation of the "Méry cassette", in 2000, which puts it in the spotlight. This man, head of research offices at the RPR, had recorded a posthumous video testimony in which he directly accused Jacques Chirac of being involved in this corruption case. Although a trial was held in June 2006, no politician was tried. The judge of instruction Armand Riberolles, successor of the judge Eric Halphen, assured at the time that "the instruction has not managed to formally establish the personal involvement of officials within the political apparatus of the RPR".
The markets of high schools of Île-de-France
In 1995, the justice is interested in the contracts signed since 1988 by the public authorities with companies of the building for the renovation of the high schools of Ile-de-France. As in the HLM, an extensive system of false invoices is highlighted, with the aim of financing the activities of the RPR. Michel Roussin, director of cabinet of Jacques Chirac at the Paris mayor, is condemned. If his name was widely quoted throughout the case, Jacques Chirac, protected by his immunity as President of the Republic, will never be worried.
The case of airline tickets
Between 1992 and 1995, while he was mayor of Paris and president of the RPR, Jacques Chirac paid his air tickets in cash to a travel agency in Neuilly, for an amount of more than three million francs. Several members of his family (his wife Bernadette and his daughter Claude) would have resorted to the same method of payment. Private trips to the United States, Mauritius or Japan were mentioned. Included in the file of the markets of high schools of Ile-de-France, this investigation finally failed and the prosecutions were abandoned.
The expenses of mouth to the city hall of Paris
In 2002, when he thinks only of his re-election as president, Jacques Chirac is implicated by a report by the Inspector General of the City of Paris. He is accused of having spent 2.1 million euros for food and reception expenses when he was mayor of Paris, between 1987 and 1995, or 4000 euros per day on average, at the expense of the taxpayer. Bertrand Delanoë, his successor at the Paris mayor, then decided to file a complaint. But the court will finally pronounce a dismissal in 2003 because the eventual facts were prescribed at the time of the complaint of the city of Paris.