IN A failed attempt to save the wife of a leading public figure from indictment, French officials went literally to the ends of the earth, renting a helicopter in Katmandu at a cost of £1,807 to French taxpayers.
The officials in question are members of President Jacques Chirac's ruling Rally for the Republic (RPR), and the man they tried to protect is Mr Jean Tiberi, Mr Chirac's chosen successor as mayor of Paris. Or rather, Mr Tiberi's wife, Xaviere.
French newspapers have made a laughing stock of the interior and justice ministers, who, in hopes of stopping legal proceedings against Ms Tiberi, ordered the French embassy in Katmandu to find the Prosecutor of Evry, Mr Laurent Davenas - regarded as sympathetic to Ms Tiberi's case - while he was on a two week trekking holiday in the Himalayas.
An embassy official duly rented an Ecureuil helicopter from Nepati Airways and set off on a three hour search for the man described by the satirical Canard Enchaine as "the abominable snow prosecutor".
In vain. When Mr Davenas returned to base camp and heard that a helicopter had visited with the message "call your office" he thought it was a joke. It wasn't. For in his absence, Mr Davenas's idealistic deputy, Mr Hubert Dujardin, had demanded that Ms Tiberi's dossier be turned over to him. The local judiciary police were nervous - they had received orders from Mr Davenas to leave the case in his hands - and appealed to the Minister of the Interior for instructions.
After consulting his counterpart at justice, the Interior Minister Mr Jean Louis Debre, decided that Mr Davenas must be reached at all costs. But before Mr Davenas could be told to rein in his deputy, legal proceedings were initiated against Ms Tiberi who is now almost certain to be indicted for misappropriation of public funds.
The saga began last June 27th when a magistrate investigating another scandal searched the Paris apartment of the mayor and Ms Tiberi. The magistrate discovered a 36 page report on "decentralised co operation" written by Ms Tiberi. For this endeavour - riddled with spelling errors and repetitions - the mayor's wife received the sum of £24,096 from the General Council of the Essonne, one of France's 95 administrative departments.
By her own admission, Ms Tiberi never set foot in the Essonne. To make matters worse, much of her report was found to have been plagiarised from a 1989 book. Mr Xavier Dugoin, the
RPR official who gave the lucrative contract to Ms Tiberi, is also under investigation for hiring his wife - at a rate of £2,771 per month - to proof read documents before he signed them.
According to the Canard Enchaine, Ms Tiberi has threatened "to tell a few picturesque anecdotes about the financial morals of the Parisian RPR" if she is brought to trial. Had Mr Davenas gone deep sea diving instead of trekking in the Himalayas, Le Canard joked, "the French navy would have sent a nuclear submarine to find him".
