From the Daily Telegraph:
“The suspicion of past corruption tainting Jacques Chirac’s presidency returned to haunt him [las week] when a court imposed suspended sentences and fines on his former henchmen. A defence lawyer representing one of the most prominent of the 47 accused of an illegal party funding scandal had earlier spoken of “empty chairs” in the Paris courtroom. One man missing from the proceedings was “the president whose name we dare not utter,” the lawyer alleged. The outcome of the trial, which highlighted kickbacks of £50 million from school building contracts, was another crushing indictment of a political system riddled with corruption from the late 1980s to the mid 1990s.The main beneficiary of the kickbacks was the RPR, the party Mr Chirac founded in 1976.”