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Sarkosy joins Chirac as former Presidents of France convicted of Corruption
1 Mar, 2021 13:11
Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy, wearing a protective face mask, arrives for the verdict in
his trial on charges of corruption and influence peddling, at Paris courthouse, France, March 1, 2021.
© Reuters / Gonzalo Fuentes
Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy has been found guilty of corruption on charges of trying to bribe a magistrate. The judge sentenced Sarkozy to three years in prison, with two years suspended.
Judge Christine Mee, who presided over the case, stated that the 66-year-old former political leader had “used his status as former French president” in a “particularly serious” act of wrongdoing, as she handed down the sentence.
Sarkozy was put on trial over accusations of trying to bribe Gilbert Azibert, a French magistrate, by offering him a well-paid job in Monaco in return for information about a criminal investigation into his political party at the time, the Union for a Popular Movement.
The investigation was looking into claims that Sarkozy and his party had received illegal payments from businesswoman Liliane Bettencourt during his successful 2007 presidential campaign.
The trial saw the former president accused of influence-peddling and violation of professional secrecy, with prosecutors seeking a four-year sentence with two years suspended for Sarkozy.
Prosecutors had focused their case on recorded conversations involving the co-defendants, where the bribery scheme was discussed, with Herzog mentioning in one call that Azibert was interested in a job in Monaco, and Sarkozy claiming he would “help” him.
Throughout the trial and despite the sentencing, Sarkozy has denied the allegations and protested his innocence. He is expected to appeal the court’s judgement.
While the former president has been given a one-year prison term and a two-year suspended term, the judge ruled that Sarkozy would be allowed to serve his sentence wearing an electronic tag under house arrest.
The investigation into Sarkozy can be traced back to the creation of France’s National Financial Prosecutor’s Office in 2014, which was investigating the former president over allegations that he had illegally received millions of euro in campaign financing from the ex-Libyan leader Muammar Gaddaffi. As part of their case, prosecutors tapped Sarkozy’s phone and that of his then-lawyer Herzog, recording conversations that revealed the bribery scheme.
Sarkozy is still facing another trial later this year, alongside 13 other individuals, over charges of illegally financing his 2012 presidential campaign. The case will focus on claims his office used a system of false accounting to hide overspending. He ultimately lost that election to Francois Hollande.
Alongside the former president, the French court also found co-defendants Thierry Herzog, Sarkozy’s former lawyer, and Gilbert Azibert, the magistrate he was accused of bribing, guilty and gave them the same sentence.
This is the second time in France’s history that a former president has been given a prison sentence. Jacques Chirac, who was Sarkozy’s predecessor, was found guilty of misusing public money in 2011 and was handed a two-year suspended sentence over criminal actions that occurred during his time as mayor of Paris.
US inspector finds AT LEAST $2.4 billion ‘wasted’ on buildings in Afghanistan
in ‘clear pattern’ of misuse and destruction
1 Mar, 2021 21:06
File photo: Men peer through windows of their building blown out by a bomb in Kabul, Afghanistan, December 20, 2020. © REUTERS/Mohammad Ismail
Billions of US taxpayer dollars have been wasted on building infrastructure in Afghanistan that isn’t actually needed or can’t be used or maintained properly, says a new report from a special inspector, unlikely to change things.
The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) identified “about $2.4 billion in assets that were unused or abandoned, had not been used for their intended purposes, had deteriorated, or were destroyed” out of nearly $7.8 billion the US has spent on capital assets in the country.
Only $1.2 billion worth of assets were being used as intended, and only $343.2 million worth was in good condition, SIGAR said in a report sent to Congress at the end of February.
As long as the money is flowing, that's all that matters. Doesn't matter who it goes to or what it is for. War-mongering oligarchs will just continue to get richer.
These capital assets were just a portion of the nearly $36 billion the US has spent since 2002 to “support governance and economic and social development,” in Afghanistan, on top of the cost of waging war against the Taliban, Al-Qaeda, Islamic State and other groups designated as terrorists.
Since SIGAR’s establishment in 2008, the inspectorate’s reports have shown “a clear pattern of nonuse, misuse, deterioration, or destruction” of capital assets the US built for the Afghan government. The latest report includes the detailed descriptions of a “stratified sample” of 60 capital assets, concluding that 91 percent of the $792.1 million spent on them went to projects that were “unused or abandoned, were not used as intended, had deteriorated, were destroyed, or had some combination of the above.”
The sample included roads and bridges, hospitals, schools, irrigation systems, power plants, police and border facilities. Among the examples were a hospital in the Parwan province designed for a staff of 150 that only had 19 employees; one crumbling and one completely destroyed bridge; and a “center of excellence” school for boys in the Laghman province that ended up serving as a guest house for visiting government officials instead.
There was even a garbage incinerator facility built at a military base used by both US and Afghan government forces that never got used because “open-air burn pits… cost less to operate.” Meanwhile, US veterans have complained of a variety of chronic conditions attributed to burn pits.
SIGAR concluded that many capital assets were not wanted or needed to begin with and the Afghans lacked resources to maintain or use them as intended, but also that in some cases the US agencies behind them – primarily the Pentagon, State Department and USAID – simply didn’t deliver the projects to the locals on time and in a usable state.
Given that SIGAR has been warning about wasteful spending in Afghanistan for over 12 years now, it doesn’t appear likely that the latest report will make much of a difference in Washington.
The House Oversight and Reform Committee scheduled a hearing about it for March 16. The chair of the Subcommittee on National Security Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-Massachusetts) said that US taxpayer resources “must be more wisely and carefully allocated to ensure they do not go to waste.” However, he prefaced that by saying he believes that “targeted humanitarian relief and construction assistance for Afghanistan was and is warranted.”
The US invaded Afghanistan in October 2001, after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, DC were blamed on Al-Qaeda and the Taliban government was accused of sheltering the terrorist group’s leader Osama bin Laden. He was tracked down and killed in Pakistan in 2011, but the war in Afghanistan continued.
Under the terms of the peace agreement the Trump administration signed with the Taliban in February 2020, US troops were supposed to leave Afghanistan by May 2021. The Biden administration has walked back that commitment, however, accusing the Taliban of not honoring their part of the bargain.
Of course, Biden would walk it back. Deep State is back in charge in Washington so the money will just keep flowing to friends in Afghanistan as it has begun again in Syria.
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