African dirty cash scandal rocks France

African leaders gave French former president Jacques Chirac and possible presidential candidate Dominique de Villepin $20 million in cash, including to finance elections, a lawyer claimed on Monday. The money came from several presidents of France's former African colonies, and was handed over by himself to the centre-right politicians in stages between 1995 and 2005, Robert Bourgi said in an interview with Europe 1 radio. Insisting he was coming forward now because he wanted a "clean France", Bourgi said the system of kickbacks had also existed under former presidents Georges Pompidou, Valerie Giscard d'Estaing and Francois Mitterrand. He said he could not estimate how much had been handed over before he became directly involved, but could speak about the deliveries he said he had made to Chirac's office when he was mayor of Paris and later to Villepin. "I'd estimate at around $20 million what I handed to Mr Chirac and to Dominique de Villepin," he told Europe 1, fleshing out the detail of claims he had already made in a newspaper interview that appeared on Sunday. The allegations, which were furiously denied by Chirac and Villepin, come just seven months before France's presidential election, in which President Nicolas Sarkozy could face a Villepin challenge from within the right. Villepin, a suave diplomat best remembered for leading the charge against the Iraq war at the United Nations in 2003, has said the revelations are aimed at derailing his presidential bid. Bourgi, an unofficial long-time pointman between French and African leaders, catalogued what he said were lavish gifts bestowed by African rulers on their counterparts in Paris, including memorabilia to noted Napoleon Bonaparte fan Villepin. "As president (Gabon's Omar) Bongo and African leaders knew he liked African art and that he admired the emperor," Villepin "received busts of the emperor, rare items to do with the emperor Napoleon and African masks," Bourgi told Europe 1. On Sunday, Bourgi detailed other gifts, including a watch with 200 diamonds given to Chirac by Bongo. "A splendid object but difficult to wear in France," Bourgi said. Bourgi is widely reported to be close to Sarkozy, but insisted in the interview that he was neither an official nor unofficial advisor to the president, simply someone who was sometimes consulted for an opinion. While Bourgi has been at pains to stress that such practices did not continue under Sarkozy, who gave him the presigious Legion d'Honneur award in 2007, but a former aide to Chirac said Monday that "nothing stopped with Sarkozy." He "went to Libreville as early as July 2007 and made a new deal with Omar Bongo, who, they say, gave him a billion African francs (over 1.5 million euros)," Probst said. The suggestion that payments had stopped under Sarkozy is "not credible, it's even the biggest lie of his life," Probst said. Chirac and Villepin have said they will lodge lawsuits against Bourgi, who described himself as "repentant" after having for years taken part in "the dark side of Francafrique" a French term describing the country's sometimes murky relations with its former colonies in Africa. Asked what African leaders got in exchange for their cash, Bourgi said: "Lies, lies, lies, unkept promises, meaning that France would close its eyes to certain abuses of power in Africa." Bourgi admitted that he had no proof to back up his allegations, while a former minister from Sarkozy's UMP party, also a lawyer, said he was shocked by the revelations as they implicated Bourgi himself. "I'm surprised because Mr Bourgi is seriously incriminating himself," Patrick Devedjian told LCI television. "This is a kind of personal confession, he's asserted his role which implies his own penal responsibility. He will have to give a serious account to justice, beyond defamation." "In all election campaigns, there's mudslinging in every direction," he said.