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French judges to question IMF chief Lagarde in May over suspected 'misappropriation of public funds'

17 AVRIL 2013 | BY LAURENT MAUDUIT

International Monetary Fund (IMF) chief Christine Lagarde is to be questioned next month by French judges investigating the suspected misappropriation of more than 400 million euros of public funds, well-informed sources have told Mediapart.

Mediapart understands the probable date of her interrogation is May 23rd. The IMF managing director and former French finance minister faces being immediately placed under investigation - a status one step short of being charged – by the magistrates from the Court of Justice of the Republic (CJR), a special French court which is designated to investigate suspected malpractice by government members in the course of their duties, and to judge them if charges are brought.

The CJR is investigating an arbitration procedure that in 2008 awarded controversial French tycoon Bernard Tapie 403 million euros compensation from the public purse. Lagarde is suspected of 'aiding and abetting falsification' in relation to the arbitration process and of 'misappropriation of public funds' while she was France's finance minister under the presidency of Nicolas Sarkozy.

It was her approval that the case should be removed from the legal system and placed in an arbitration process that led to the huge payout.

There is no suggestion that Lagarde benefited personally from any decision she made, and she denies any wrongdoing.

One of the key questions in the CJR investigation is why Lagarde pursued the decision of her predecessor, Jean-Louis Borloo, a close friend of Tapie for whom he once served as a lawyer, to remove the case from the justice courts and opted for a private arbitration procedure that was highly favourable for Tapie.

The decision to drop the legal fight and enter into arbitration was taken immediately after President Nicolas Sarkozy's election in May 2007, when Borloo was appointed, for a one-month period, finance minister. Lagarde succeeded him in June 2007.

It has long been suggested that most of the instructions over the Tapie arbitration affair came from Sarkozy who was a friend of Tapie, a flamboyant tycoon and former centre-left politician who subsequently gave public support to conservative Sarkozy's 2007 election campaign.

But Lagarde herself has always denied the suggestion of the Elysée's close involvement, and it was her who signed most of the administrative papers related to the affair.

The case was handed to the CJR in 2011, when Jean-Louis Nadal, then France's most senior public prosecutor, filed a report detailing the suspicions over the role of Lagarde - and which include what he described then as her suspected "abuse of authority" - and several senior civil servants in pushing through the private arbitration procedure that ensured the huge payout to Tapie.

The arbitration process ended his longstanding dispute with a state agency handling the liabilities of the former, publicly-owned Crédit Lyonnais bank.

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