Bettencourt-Woerth-Sarkozy case, or how to drown the fish according to the rules of the art

I pass you this note Mecanopolis which summarizes well the situation of the imbroglio of the Woerth-Bettencourt affair.

To better understand how the Bettencourt-Woerth-Sarkozy affair took a new turn and metamorphosed from a secret political party financing affair into a simple financial crime affair, it is necessary to read carefully what follows. For more than a month, each day has brought its share of revelations in the Bettencourt affair, which has become the soap opera of the summer of 2010, which is about to eclipse the television series of the genre. The Flames of love, Columbo et Inspector Derrick. Whatever the UMP's "barkers" and "barkers" say, led by Fillon who asks UMP deputies "to have nerves of steel", and Sarkozy who himself "cleared" his Minister of work by monopolizing Monday July 12 the antenna on France 2, from 20 p.m. of a political party by a generous and wealthy patron, octogenarian billionaire Liliane Bettencourt.

After the revelations of Mediapart, the socialist party demands the constitution of a parliamentary commission of inquiry and the appointment of an independent judge. By asking for the creation of a parliamentary commission of inquiry, the Socialist Party knows full well that the results of the inquiry will give birth to a mouse and that the UMP and the government will use it, as they did with the bogus IGF report, to "whitewash" themselves. Waiting for a parliamentary commission to bring out the truth in the Bettencourt affair is a waste of time, because it has no binding power with regard to the main protagonists and even less vis-à-vis Woerth and Sarkozy. It is hard to see a parliamentary commission going to poke its nose into the accounts of the UMP. It is not for nothing that Bernard Accoyer, President of the National Assembly, hastened to approve the proposal of the Socialists for the constitution of a parliamentary commission of inquiry into the Bettencourt affair.

As for the appointment of an independent judge, the socialists show themselves to be quite naive and they are struck by an incredible amnesia when they forget the Urba affair at the beginning of the 1990s and the role played at the time by Commissioner Antoine Gaudino and the examining magistrate Thierry Jean Pierre who had exploited justice for political purposes. It should be remembered that those who were at the origin of the URBA affair were a judicial police commissioner at the SRPJ in Marseille, Antoine Gaudino, close to the Front National and an investigating judge, Thierry Jean Pierre, today now deceased but who had been elected MEP on the list of Philippe de Villers. All the same, a paradox must be raised in the URBA affair. If the judges Thierry Jean Pierre and Renaud van Ruymbeke were able to carry out their investigations until the end, it is not because the judges and the judiciary were independent under the reign of the socialists but it is quite simply because of the internal struggles opposing the different currents of the party, struggles which found their extension inside the judicial machine and which paralyzed its action to slow down the investigations in the URBA affair. Without the settling of scores between the rival currents of the socialist party, Henri Emmanuelli, former treasurer of the socialist party, would never have been sentenced to an eighteen-month suspended prison sentence, two years of deprivation of civic rights and 30 free fine. We do not know exactly what an independent judge means, because judges depend on the Ministry of Justice, which appoints and appoints them. We do not see how in these conditions, judges appointed by a political power, in this case the Keeper of the Seals, can investigate with complete objectivity and independence, especially in so-called sensitive cases involving a party leader, a President of the Republic, a leader or a member of government. To prevent any criminal proceedings against him in the fictitious jobs at the town hall of Paris, bribes and bank accounts, the former President of the Republic, Jacques Chirac, assisted at the time by Roland Dumas, President of the Constitutional Council, had passed by his majority a law paralyzing any public action during his mandate. Silvio Berlusconi had done the same thing in Italy to paralyze any action or legal proceedings against him. Judges independent of the political power that appoints them and feeds them is quite simply utopia. The existence of the three separate powers is rubbish and with his theory of the separation of powers, Baron de Montesquieu has it all wrong. All that exists in a capitalist society is first and foremost a mega power, economic power, which conditions and determines the properties of all powers.

Someone once said that the best way to bury a politico-financial affair is to create a parliamentary commission of inquiry. This legend may be 50% true, but to be 100% true, it is rather justice subservient to political power that is best equipped to accomplish this alchemy. With the Bettencourt-Woerth-Sarkozy affair, the technique of judicial diversion was immediately triggered as soon as it was revealed by Mediapart on June 16, 2010. It is necessary to explain in a few words what this technique of legal diversion consists of, which automatically engages like a safety valve as soon as politicians or a political party are wet up to their necks in a politico-financial affair. When a case of corruption is revealed by the press, the political power rushes to announce to public opinion the referral to justice whose mission, to use the usual formula, "to bring out the truth". So far, everyone firmly believes that they live in a democracy with a judicial "power" independent of the political class and economic power. Everyone also believes that justice conducts objective investigations with procedures implemented in an impartial and objective manner. Which is entirely false. To elucidate a criminal case, it is necessary to start with work on the ground carried out by investigating judges and by prosecutors who are supported by investigators from the judicial police. The investigators of the judicial police do not just do as they please, they investigate according to the qualifications of the facts retained beforehand by the prosecutors and the examining magistrates. Once provided with these instructions, the investigators of the judicial police will gather clues and material or human elements (through the testimony and interrogations of those in custody) and this in accordance with and according to the qualifications of the facts retained by the prosecutors and the investigating judges who, themselves, receive oral or written instructions, depending on the case, from the Keeper of the Seals. It is these clues and these material elements thus gathered and recorded in the minutes which will determine the normal course of the case and which will orient in one direction or another the trial which will be held before the court. With regard to investigations of flagrante delicto, things are simpler because the material evidence and the perpetrators of the offence, misdemeanor and crime are still present at the very place of the crime or misdemeanor. It is the topicality and the immediate anteriority of the crime and the misdemeanor which somehow simplifies the work of the investigators of the judicial police. But when it comes to cases in which the acts are spread out over time and space, things get complicated because of the complexity of the acts and their spacing in time between the time of the commission of the offence, of the misdemeanor and the crime and the one where the work of the search for clues and human and material elements really begins. In politico-financial affairs, things turn out to be even more complicated because of the opacity that surrounds the politico-financial world and the corruption that is usually done according to the rules of the art, that is to say by the payment of cash and suitcases of banknotes from the corrupters to the corrupt.

Let us now return to the Bettencourt-Woerth-Sarkozy affair to see how the technique of judicial diversion worked as soon as the affair was revealed by Mediapart on June 16, 2010. Let us remember for all intents and purposes that the Bettencourt-Woerth-Sarkozy affair started with the publication by Mediapart of extracts from recordings made by the butler of the billionaire of L'Oréal where it is a question of three checks given to three political figures: Valerie Pecresse, Nicolas Sarkozy and Eric Woerth. Without being formal and definitive proof, these pirated recordings published by Mediapart on June 16, 2010 create a strong presumption of hidden financing of the UMP and Sarkozy's presidential campaign by the generous donor, Liliane Bettencourt. In these pirated recordings, we hear the voice of Patrice de Maistre asking Liliane Bettencourt to sign the three checks in question. Certainly, the words of Patrice de Maistre are not irrefutable proof but they nevertheless have the merit of constituting clues and material elements on which the investigators can rely to carry out their investigations in the Bettencourt affair. But nothing has been done to verify the reality of the statements of Patrice de Maistre and the real beneficiaries of the checks signed by Liliane Bettencourt. If there were independent judges and an independent judiciary, these first important clues delivered by the pirated recordings published by Mediapart would have led logically and immediately (say three or four days later) to the opening of a judicial investigation or a preliminary investigation with a rogatory commission empowered to search not at the headquarters of the Clymène company which manages the fortune of Liliane Bettencourt or at the photographer François Banier's but at the headquarters of the UMP with the key to seizing the diskettes where stored and recorded the accounting transactions of this political party. The sound legal logic would have been, through the judicial information or the preliminary investigation, to verify whether or not the clues provided by the pirated recordings are of a nature to form the constituent elements of a breach of the law. on the financing of political parties. Nothing of the sort was done in the Bettencourt-Woerth-Sarkozy case, whereas in the URBA case, judges Thierry Jean Pierre and Renaud van Rymbeke went to the headquarters of the PS to search and check the accounting books. party. There was indeed the opening of a preliminary investigation into the Bettencourt affair on the recordings, but it was only opened on July 9, 2010, ie 25 days after the revelation of the Bettencourt affair by Mediapart.

(really average the gag of the burqua)

Instead of temporarily retaining the qualification of hidden political party financing and implementing the related procedures, the judicial machine is racing but to steer the Betencourt affair in a direction that would deprive it of any political character. The chronology of events and the pace of ongoing judicial investigations show that the technique of judicial diversion fully plays its role of "disorienting". Indeed, since the setting in motion of the legal machine, the question of the checks and the financing of the UMP and the presidential campaign of Sarkozy disappears or passes to the last plan so as not to appear only the incidental sides of the Bettencourt affair like the island of Arros in the Seychelles, the fraud and tax evasion of part of Liliane Bettencourt's fortune in Switzerland, Lichtenstein, Uruguay. Thus, thanks to the technique of judicial diversion, the Bettencourt affair was metamorphosed into a simple case of financial crime affecting actors and second-rate characters whose role was more to cover their tracks than to reveal the "truth". For example, we hear more and more in the media of names such as François-Marie Banier, the photographer accused by the billionaire's daughter of having extorted a billion euros from her mother, from the manager of Arros Island to Seychelles, Carlos Vijarana, Fabrice Goguel, the former tax lawyer of Madame Bettencourt or the manager of the Clymène company, Patrice de Maistre. From now on, when the mass media evoke the Bettencourt affair, it is to talk about the legal disputes of the billionaire with her daughter Françoise Bettencourt-Meyers. On Eric Woerth, on Sarkozy, on the UMP and the 2007 presidential campaign, radio silence. If these investigations and police custody are now oriented in the direction of tax evasion and evasion, it is thanks to this formidable alchemy that is the technique of judicial diversion which has the merit of washing politicians and their corruptors above all suspicion and according to the rules of the art.

We cannot end this article on the Bettencourt-Woerth-Sarkozy affair without having a very special "thought" for the "unhappy" Florence Woerth, the wife of the Minister of Labor who resigned from the Clymène company, the manager of Liliane Bettencourt's fortune to avoid conflicts of interest. After her hasty departure from the Clymène company, one would have thought that Florence Woerth spent most of her time at Assedic. Error. The latest news, Florence Woerth has created a stable of racehorses by chance after the vote of a relative law initiated by her husband and relating to the liberalization of online racing games. That's not all. With her stable of racehorses, Florence Woerth combines another "work" by sitting on the Supervisory Board of Hermès, a subsidiary of the LVMH group, owned by another billionaire, rival of the boss of L'Oréal, Bernard Arnaut. . While her husband is dealing with the extension of the retirement age from 60 to 62, his wife Florence Woerth will have no retirement problems since she is paid in the form of attendance fees by the Supervisory Board from Hermès, a subsidiary of the LVMH group, up to 400 euros per year. A little less than at the same time as the collector of yellow coins and the hope of French luxury in the world, Madame Bernadette Chirac who sits on the board of directors of LVMH and who receives the tidy sum of 000 euros per year. It goes without saying that Bernadette Chirac 650 years old and Florence Woerth 000 years old will have no worries for their old age and they will not have to mold in retirement homes between four walls, between Inspector Derrick and question for champion. It was believed that the privileges in France were definitely abolished on the night of August 77, 53.