French court tells website to remove Sarkozy recordings

AFP/DPA/Paris

A French court has ordered a news website to remove the recordings of secretly-taped conversations involving Nicolas Sarkozy when he was president, in what has become known as the “Sarkoleaks” scandal.

Sarkozy and his wife Carla Bruni, who is also heard in some of the private conversations, launched legal action last week after extracts of the tapes secretly recorded by the former leader’s then political advisor Patrick Buisson were published on news site Atlantico.

A Paris court ruled that Atlantico -  hich has already removed recordings involving Bruni on the basis that the model and singer is not a politician – would have to get rid of other extracts still on the site.

The website has said it will appeal the decision.

The court also sentenced Buisson, a former historian and journalist and a self-styled royalist with links to the far-right, to pay 20,000 euros ($28,000) in damages to the couple.

France has some of the strictest privacy laws in the world but the damages awarded by courts for breaches are usually relatively low.

The Sarkozys had sought 30,000 euros in damages from Buisson, who was behind the right-wing lurch in Sarkozy’s failed 2012 re-election campaign.

It is not clear how the media came in possession of the tapes.

Buisson, who is said to have taped the conversations for historical purposes, claimed the tapes were stolen.

Sarkozy’s lawyer Richard Malka said the ruling would serve as a warning to the media.

“We cannot live in fear of being permanently recorded and then seeing our remarks broadcast on the Internet,” he said.

The recordings contain hours of Sarkozy’s private conversations with Bruni and close aides, and it is unclear how the extracts available online made their way into the public domain.

While they do not contain any explosive content, the tapes caused a furore in the French political class which denounced an act of treachery by Buisson that could even be a potential threat to national security.

In one of the extracts, Bruni is heard joking about Sarkozy being a kept man and teasing him that her status as first lady has prevented her from signing lucrative deals to promote wrinkle creams.

However nothing emerged from the tapes with the potential to impact Sarkozy’s plan to return to politics in time for the 2017 presidential election, unlike other corruption cases he is allegedly implicated in.

Just a few days after the private conversations were published, Le Monde daily revealed that Sarkozy was suspected of attempting to pervert the course of justice by trying to obtain secret information about a court case from a friendly judge.

Investigators got the alleged information when they heard a conversation between Sarkozy and his lawyer after tapping the former president’s phones over a separate probe into allegations the late Libyan leader Muammar Gadhafi helped finance his 2007 election campaign.

The phone-tapping revelations – a first for a former president – caused outrage among Sarkozy’s supporters. The centre-right opposition has since accused the Socialist government of political espionage over the taps.

IMF chief to be questioned again in graft case

Christine Lagarde, the head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), is once again due to be questioned in an ongoing French corruption case, sources close to the case said yesterday.

Lagarde will be questioned on Wednesday by a special court that probes cases of ministerial misconduct over her role in a 400mn-euro ($556mn) state payout made to disgraced tycoon Bernard Tapie in 2008, the anonymous sources said.

Prosecutors working for the Court of Justice of the Republic suspect he received favourable treatment in return for supporting Nicolas Sarkozy in the 2007 presidential election.

They have suggested Lagarde – who at the time was finance minister – was partly responsible for “numerous anomalies and irregularities” which could lead to charges for complicity in fraud and misappropriation of public funds.