Paris
A major political scandal unfolding in France has been mostly ignored by the world press. It involves, among others, a president, a prime minister, a minister of defense, a minister of the interior, a top spy, and a business executive. Every day brings some new twist.

It all started with a book published in February 2001. Révélation$ was written by the whistleblowing banker Ernest Backes and the investigative reporter Denis Robert. It details an alleged money-laundering system put in place by the Luxembourg-based financial clearinghouse Clearstream.

Then in November 2003, General Philippe Rondot, a former leader of the DGSE (equivalent to the CIA) and a Ministry of Defense civil servant, obtained the names of several French public figures who had accounts with Clearstream. Rondot said that the list had been given to him by Jean-Louis Gergorin, vice chairman of the European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company (EADS), the holding company of the aircraft manufacturer Airbus, and a close friend of then Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin.

To obtain the list, Gergorin, in turn, had used the services of Imad Lahoud, a shady Lebanese banker and computer engineer who is related to the embattled Lebanese president. In March 2004, Lahoud was arrested by French police on one of several charges outstanding against him. On his person, the police found a letter written by Gergorin stating that Lahoud was working on a special counterterrorism project under the cover of being an EADS employee.

When Rondot found out that the letter named him as Lahoud's main contact, he was furious, and called Gergorin, who could only apologize. A few minutes after that phone conversation, Villepin called Rondot and ordered him to free Lahoud. Already skeptical about the case, Rondot decided to look into it further. He quickly concluded that the list was bogus, and so informed the defense minister. But the story did not end there.

Instead, in mid-2004, a French judge in charge of a major corruption case received an anonymous letter and a CD-Rom containing another list of people who had supposedly opened accounts with Clearstream. Those incriminated included top French politicians like Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Alain Madelin, and, most important, Villepin's archrival Nicolas Sarkozy, who is now interior minister. After investigating, the judge concluded in the fall of 2004 that the whole story was a well-orchestrated fraud.

Since then the judge has been digging to find out who was behind it. This spring, he had Gergorin's office and apartment searched, along with Rondot's, the DGSE headquarters, and even the Ministry of Defense.

But the real bombshell came on April 28, when LeMonde published snippets of Rondot's testimony before the judge last month. Rondot testified that as early as January 2004, during a meeting at the Quai d'Orsay attended by Gergorin, Foreign Minister Villepin had asked him, on Chirac's orders, to investigate potential corruption by politicians including Sarkozy. This, at a time when Villepin allegedly knew that the fake list of Clearstream accounts was the work of his friend Gergorin. Villepin also asked Rondot not to inform the defense minister, Michèle Alliot-Marie, whose husband is friendly with Sarkozy.