French weekly magazines review

Sarkozy's back in the news, although not necessarily for the reasons he'd like to be.There's a look back at Italy's struggle with the mafia. And a grim tale of the effect of drugs on a child.

Not a single day goes by nowadays without the name of Nicolas Sarkozy making its way onto the front pages of newspapers.

That’s the opinion held by Marianne, adding that commentators speak less about the former president's political plans and more about his judicial problems and trivialities.

Sarkozy stands on a heap of suspected scandals, according to Marianne: the Bettencourt affair, in which he is accused of having taken advantage of the rich heiress of the L’Oréal dynasty to fund his 2007 presidential campaign, the discovery of irregularities in his 2012 campaign budget and the Bernard Tapie affair in which he is portrayed by some judges as the “leader of an organised gang of high-flying crooks”.

Le Point has no doubt that the 400 million euros compensation deal at the centre of the affair has become a fully blown state scandal. The right-wing weekly names the 11 key actors at the heart of the dossier, claiming that they are all Sarkozy cronies.

As the judiciary appears set to quash the decision of the arbitration panel, Le Point claims that the government has filed an injunction, acting on behalf of taxpayers, to recover the money. But it warns that Tapie will probably have spent all the money by the time the verdict is rendered. He has already splashed out 25 million to buy the Hersant Sud newspaper group, 40 million to buy a yacht, 47 million to buy himself a villa in Saint Tropez and 23 million on a luxury jet.

Le Canard says that Monsieur Sarkozy’s friendship with Tapie spans 30 years, recalling that the tycoon was deliriously happy about Sarkozy’s election as president on the morning of 7 May 2007, screaming that “the little guy has won, the Adidas deal is done; now the bucks will flow”. The satirical weekly believes Sarkozy could escape prosecution in the Tapie affair, though, if the judges rule that he approved the 400-million-euro payout in his capacity of president, rather than an individual making a gesture to his friend.

For L’Express the matter exposes the worst aspects of the French republic, where a strong tendency to steal prevails, where money and vengeance have become the order of the day in politics with the greedy and corrupt locking horns with the ambitious and opportunistic.

Investigations into Sarkozy’s former chief of staff, Claude Guéant, could ruin, the ex-president’s planned return to politics, due to what Le Nouvel Observateur describes as the “Cardinal’s black money”. In 2008 Guéant wanted to invest in precious stones, the magazine says, but had no money until he got a message from an art collector offering to buy his paintings at six times their market value. The revelations are “letting off a stench of corruption”, according to the left-leaning magazine.

L’Express has been speaking to a key witness to Italy’s bloody wars with the Sicilian mafia in the 1990s, as a landmark trial of several godfathers takes place in Palermo.

Attilio Bolzoni, a journalist with the leading Italian paper, La Repubblica, had a front-row seat during Cosa Nostra’s reign of terror, as mafia-paid executioners went after prosecutors and police agents, eliminating them one by one.

L’Express says Bolzoni knew all the fallen heroes and tht his mind is still full of details about the fracas of bombs, the solitude of the judges and anecdotes about how Cosa Nostra and the anti-mafia squads operated.

L’Express shows the ugly face of drug-trafficking exposed by the two-year-old baby, rushed to a Parisian hospital after suffering a fit of convulsion. According to the magazine, toxicological tests of her urine and hair quickly showed that the little girl was retarded, unable to walk straight and suffering from memory loss due to passive exposure to cocaine during the pregnancy.