News

Bongo had 'questionable financial network'

June 10, 2009 Edition 2

PARIS: The death of Gabon's Omar Bongo Ondimba ignited controversy in France yesterday as ex-president Valery Giscard d'Estaing accused the late leader of presiding over a network of questionable payoffs.

Africa's longest-serving leader and France's closest ally on the continent, Bongo died on Monday in a clinic in Spain after more than four decades at the helm of the oil-rich former French colony.

President Nicolas Sarkozy paid tribute to Bongo as a "great and loyal friend of France" but Giscard shone a spotlight on the darker side of the late African leader's reign.

Giscard said the 73-year-old president had developed a "very questionable financial network" and that he broke off ties with him when he found out in 1981 the Gabonese leader was funding Jacques Chirac's bid for the presidency.

"I learned Bongo was financially supporting Jacques Chirac," Giscard told Europe 1 radio, recalling the 1981 campaign when he was running for re-election. "I called Bongo and told him 'You're supporting my rival's campaign', and there was a dead silence … Then he said 'Ah, you know about it', which was extraordinary. From that moment on, I broke off personal relations with him."

One of Chirac's former close aides, Charles Pasqua, said he was unaware of illegal party financing from Bongo's coffers.

"I've never heard, including from Bongo, that he helped finance someone's campaign," Pasqua, a former interior minister, told RTL radio. "If he did help someone financially, it would be at the president's level that the question arises. Some are still alive. Ask them."

Pasqua was cleared of charges in the far-reaching corruption probe involving state-owned oil giant Elf, which operated as an arm of the French government, defending its interests in Africa.

At his trial in 2003, the oil company's former chief executive Loik Le Floch-Prigent testified about Elf slush funds used to fund French political parties and to support foreign leaders.

France has maintained a military base in Gabon and Bongo had been widely viewed as serving its interests across west Africa. - Sapa-AFP