A French prosecutor recommended Tuesday that former Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin be convicted for his alleged role in a smear campaign against President Nicolas Sarkozy, arguing he should have put an end to rumors swirling about his rival.
Prosecutor Jean-Claude Marin called for an 18-month suspended sentence and a fine of euro45,000 ($67,370) for Villepin, one of several defendants in the complex slander trial that has rocked the country's political establishment.
A date for a verdict has not yet been set.
The Paris court has been probing who was behind an alleged campaign to discredit Sarkozy in 2004, while he was still a rising government minister with his sights on France's highest office.
Sarkozy says the smear campaign was intended to thwart his bid for the 2007 presidential election, and he filed suit saying he believed Villepin was "the primary instigator" behind it.
Sarkozy's lawyer, Thierry Herzog, said the prosecution demonstrated that Villepin, "through his own inaction, let the fraudulent action continue."
Villepin, also a government minister at the time, has denied orchestrating any plot and says Sarkozy was using the trial as a political weapon.
Villepin — famed for an eloquent 2003 speech at the United Nations arguing against the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq — said the prosecutor's arguments did not convey "the reality of what happened."
"Nicolas Sarkozy promised to hang me from a meat hook, I see that he kept his promise," Villepin said, echoing a widely reported comment attributed to Sarkozy.
Sarkozy is one of some 40 plaintiffs in the trial. Villepin, one of several defendants for whom prosecutors recommended convictions, is accused of complicity in slander and complicity in forgery.
The affair dates back to 2004, when both Sarkozy and Villepin were leading conservative hopefuls to succeed then-President Jacques Chirac.
The case began with a mysterious list purporting to show clients who held secret accounts with Luxembourg clearing house Clearstream, including Sarkozy and other leading French political and business figures. The accounts were purportedly created to hold bribes from a 1991 sale of warships to Taiwan, among other shady income.
Villepin was given the list, and he asked a retired general to investigate it. It turned out to be a hoax, but was by then already circulating among political and legal circles.
Source: AP News
