A senior French arms industry executive has admitted writing an anonymous letter at the heart of a dirty tricks scandal shaking the government, but denied it was to help Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin smear a rival.

 

Jean-Louis Gergorin said in an interview published yesterday that he alerted Villepin to a list of suspicious bank accounts allegedly belonging to politicians and civil servants, but it did not mention Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy.

 

Villepin's authority has been seriously damaged by charges he tried to smear Sarkozy, a leading contender in next year's presidential race, by prolonging a secret probe into what he quickly found out was a faked list of suspected bribe-takers.

 

Gergorin's admission answered one of the many questions in the saga, but he declined to say who produced other letters and lists that targeted Sarkozy, who denies any wrongdoing.

 

Gergorin said he discussed the list with judge Renaud Van Ruymbeke, who was investigating a bribe-ridden 1991 arms export deal, but would not repeat this in a formal deposition. "That led to the anonymous letter," he told the daily Le Parisien.

 

While confirming that he wrote the first anonymous letter in May 2004, Gergorin denied being the "crow" French slang for a writer of poison-pen letters that magistrates and media have been hunting feverishly for weeks.

 

"A crow is an anonymous informer acting in bad faith," said Gergorin, who stepped down from his post as vice president for strategic co-ordination at the European aerospace and defense company EADS in order to defend his name in the scandal.

 

"By going to see the investigating magistrate, I was not anonymous," he said.

 

A role for Russian mafia?

 

The scandal has dominated the Paris political scene so much that President Jacques Chirac lectured his ministers at the weekly cabinet meeting on Wednesday that they must work harder at advertising government successes on jobs and the economy.

 

Villepin has denied any wrong-doing over the tangled "Clearstream affair," named after the Luxembourg bank where Sarkozy was wrongly suspected of having secret accounts.

 

But he has failed to dispel suspicions of foul play. While few think he can now succeed his mentor Chirac as president in elections next year, Villepin has refused to quit.

 

In evidence of his weakened position, more than half the deputies in his party boycotted his speech during debate on a censure motion brought on Tuesday by the left-wing opposition.

 

In a report that could shed light on the origins of the murky scandal, the daily Le Monde said Gergorin mentioned the Clearstream lists of bank transfers to Van Ruymbeke because he believed they pointed to a bid by "Russian oligarchs" to take over the Lagardere arms and media group.

 

Lagardere is a core shareholder in EADS and its founder, Jean-Luc Lagardere, died in hospital in 2003 aged 75 under mysterious circumstances later described as a rare disease.

 

Gergorin believed "Lagardere was murdered by the Russian mafia," according to the leaked text Le Monde published from testimony by Van Ruymbeke to the Clearstream inquiry last week.

 

In his interview with Le Parisien, Gergorin hinted he thought Lagardere had been murdered and that foreign investors were buying up Lagardere group shares in a bid to control it.

 

He gave no further details but said he approached Van Ruymbeke in April 2004 because he thought a confidential probe launched by Villepin in January was not going quickly enough.

 

(China Daily May 19, 2006)