De Gaulle scandal

last updated 8 January 2015

Paris

The grandson of Charles de Gaulle has been accused of fraud in a case that also implicates Prime Minister Jacques Chirac. Jean de Gaulle, 50, is suspected of having diverted Parisian taxpayers’ money to fund Chirac’s neo-Gaullist party when Chirac was mayor of Paris in the early 1990s. The allegations are that de Gaulle, now a member of parliament, and others in Chirac’s mayoral administration hired fundraisers and speechwriters for the party and paid their salaries out of city coffers. “It was clear to me,” said one employee, “that I was really working under the table for the party.”