Lo Bettencourt scandal, the popular novel that has fascinated France and shaken, since its explosion in the summer of 2010, a part of its political class (the one closest to Sarkozy), is enriched with a new chapter. The Court of Appeal of Versailles ordered, in fact, a Mediapart, an information site which published the transcripts of the clandestine tapes recorded by Liliane Bettancourt's butler, to make these materials disappear from the network within 8 days.
Perhaps a less exciting chapter of this improbable story, which seems to be taken from a nineteenth-century novel or a period TV drama, but no less significant, and which should make us reflect on the state of things. Because precisely these transcripts, which now would like to be obscured, were the fuse that lit the Bettencourt affair, a scandal that spread until it touched the leaders of the Republic, then embodied by Nicholas Sarkozy, officially under investigation since March, after the loss of immunity, for circumvention of an incapacitated person.
The incompetent would be, precisely, Liliane Bettencourt, now 91, the richest woman in France and the ninth in the world, heir and still the main shareholder of the immense fortunes of the cosmetics multinational L'Oreal. Surrounding it, as reported by the offending tapes, are men of all kinds, from the photographer François-Marie Banier, accredited with consultancy for 993 million euros, up to Eric Woerth, minister of the Budget and then of Labor in the Sarkozy government, dragged into the mud and resigned due to the scandal. But above all there is Nicolas Sarkozy, accused of having received tens of thousands of euros from the heiress to finance his 2007 electoral campaign.
Officially, the reason for the sentence against Mediapart is the "attack on the private life" of Liliane Bettencourto, but seen from here the decision of the Court of Appeal seems more like a slightly puerile attempt to close the barn when the oxen have already escaped, making a decision out of time from a historical and political point of view.
In recent days, after a period of relative calm, French journalists have revolted, incited by the statements of the director of Mediapart Edwy Pienel, who spoke of a liberticidal act of judicial censorship.
“The French Watergate”, as the New York Times defined it, therefore still appears far from its end.
Attachments: The article in Le Monde
