Adding to the president’s difficulties was the revelation on Thursday that a close friend and the co-treasurer of his 2012 election campaign invested in offshore businesses in the Cayman Islands, a well-known tax haven.
The name of Mr. Hollande’s treasurer, Jean-Jacques Augier, appeared on a list of names of investors in two Cayman Islands funds that was leaked to the Washington-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.
In an interview with Le Monde, Mr. Augier — a publisher and former classmate of Mr. Hollande’s at the elite École Nationale d’Administration — declared that there was nothing illegal about his Cayman investments, which date to 2005 and 2009, conceding only that “maybe I lacked a bit of caution.”
Mr. Augier denied that he had hidden any income or done anything “incompatible” with the exercise of French presidential power.
At a news conference on Thursday evening in Morocco, Mr. Hollande said that “I knew nothing of these activities, these investments,” and that “if they don’t conform to the fiscal law” he would ask the appropriate authorities to act. He emphasized that the accounts of his campaign were clean.
The right in France, still stung by Mr. Hollande’s presidential victory last May, has leapt with glee on the revelations, suggesting that the Socialist government has not kept Mr. Hollande’s promises to be clean, exemplary and transparent, a supposed contrast to the administration of President Nicolas Sarkozy, who is being investigated for abuses in the financing of his 2007 campaign.
Mr. Hollande has promised to crack down on tax cheats and compel France’s wealthy to pay more in taxes, even though the economy is stagnant and unemployment is hitting record levels.
Given those promises, Mr. Hollande’s real troubles circle around the case of his former budget minister, Jérôme Cahuzac, who stepped down less than a month ago after the Paris prosecutor’s office said it was investigating him for probable tax fraud. Accusations against Mr. Cahuzac surfaced in early December after an investigative Web site, Mediapart, obtained an audio recording that it said was of Mr. Cahuzac and that suggested he had held an account with the Swiss bank UBS for roughly a decade.
Mr. Cahuzac denied the existence of any such account for months — even when confronted by Mr. Hollande himself and his direct boss, Finance Minister Pierre Moscovici. Mr. Cahuzac also denied having the accounts in appearances in Parliament and in the news media. But on Tuesday, he admitted that he had secret bank accounts worth at least 600,000 euros, about $770,000, in Switzerland and Singapore.
With Mr. Hollande on a state visit to Morocco on Thursday, his cabinet ministers were left to respond to reports that the Élysée Palace had been discreetly informed in December by the French intelligence service, the D.C.R.I., of its suspicions that Mr. Cahuzac might indeed have secret accounts.
Manuel Valls, who as interior minister oversees the intelligence service, forcefully denied the reports, saying: “There was no note from the D.C.R.I.” about Mr. Cahuzac. The president’s office also denied speculation that perhaps the intelligence service had passed its concerns to the president’s office in an informal, unsigned note.
Mr. Cahuzac’s former boss, Mr. Moscovici, has come under particularly sharp criticism in the case. In an interview on Thursday in Strasbourg, he spoke emotionally of what he described as an “unforgivable” and personal betrayal.
“I’m the one to whom he lied the most — not once, not 10 times, but much more often,” Mr. Moscovici said. “He told me he had nothing to do with that matter, with enormous energy.”
Mr. Moscovici dismissed the criticisms and suspicions that he might have known of the secret accounts and failed to act, and he said he hoped the uproar would be short-lived.
“I did everything I had to,” Mr. Moscovici said. “I was always proactive in following this case with the powers I had. And I was transparent with justice and the police. No one could say I tried to block any case.”
Mr. Moscovici said he was just an “intermediate target” — the real one being Mr. Hollande, who is being pressured by some in his party to reshuffle his government early.
A government reshuffle would make sense to change policy direction, not simply to respond to public criticism, but “the president controls the clocks,” Mr. Moscovici said.
“Anything can happen in politics,” he said. “It’s very disagreeable to be used as a target when you did everything you could and the only mistake you made was to be victim of a liar who was a colleague and a friend.”
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/05/world/europe/uproar-in-france-on-foreign-bank-accounts-deepens.html?partner=rss&emc=rss