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French press review 25 May 2013

The papers are all about IMF Cchief Christine Lagarde’s “great escape” from being charged for complicity in fraud and misappropriation of public funds.

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This was after her two-day grilling by prosecutors working on the Bernard Tapie affaire, Lagarde’s 2007 handling of a row that resulted in 400 million euros being paid to the disgraced tycoon. The judges allowed Lagarde to walk free but with the status of assisted witness which means she could face further questions and even charges at a later stage.

Le Figaro relegates the story to the back pages, considering the embarrassment Madame’s legal status is causing not just in right-wing circles and but also to President François Hollande and his government.

According to Aujourd’hui en France criminal charges against Lagarde would have been too much for France, after her predecessor and compatriot Dominique Strauss-Kahn, resigned in disgrace in 2011 over an alleged assault on a New York hotel maid.

Nicolas Sarkozy’s shadow is haunting the arbitration case says Libération. It points out that prosecutors working for the Court of Justice of the Republic suspect Bernard Tapie received favourable treatment in return for supporting Sarkozy in the 2007 presidential elections.

Libé also has some possible bad news for Tapie, who went to prison for match-fixing during his time as president of French football club Olympique de Marseille. It reports that Finance Minister Pierre Moscovici, acting on behalf of the state, plans to seek the reimbursement of the 400 million euros paid to Tapie if the court establishes the case of misappropriation of public funds.

The government’s back-tracking on capping the salaries of corporate chiefs draws comments from all the national dailies.

Le Figaro explains that the government has abandoned the reform promised in Hollande’s election campaign manifesto. The right-wing newspaper sees the move, which is causing angry reactions from some Socialists, as a symbolic gesture in favour of the business sector.

Libération lends credence to the outrage on the left as the average annual salary of Cac-40 bosses is set to remain at around 2.3 million euros. The left-leaning paper says that Left Front leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon has identified Finance Minister Pierre Moscovici as the author of the capitulation to capitalist interests, with a quote “Veni, vidi, Moscovici”.

Le Figaro takes up a looming divorce within the anti-gay marriage coalition, as the movement prepare for a rally in Paris on Sunday. Organisers predict that up to a million people will join the protest but the paper contends that a huge turnout will not be a sign of support for the opposition UMP party.

Nathalie Kosciosko-Morizet the party’s most likely candidate in the race for Paris city mayor, believes her party is continuing to flirt with the far right  and sees the tendency as a reactivation of the political losing machine that caused Sarkozy’s defeat.

The problem is that only 37 per cent of UMP voters side with her, according to a new BVA opinion survey, Le Figaro reports.

Libération returned to Bangladesh one month after the collapse of a building in Dhaka in which over 1,000 garment workers died, shaming some 27,000 Western couturiers and textile companies which make billions of euros in profit from the sweat and blood of the country’s poor. Libé reports that an estimated four million Bangladeshis, 80 per cent of them women, work in the textile industry for peanuts.

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