A JOURNALIST from Le Mondewhom the paper believes had his phones tapped by the intelligence services in order to track down the sources of his stories, has had his computer stolen during a break-in at his home.
The French daily initiated legal action last month after claiming the Élysée Palace ordered the domestic intelligence service to carry out an inquiry into the paper’s coverage of the Bettencourt party funding scandal. It alleged the Élysée wanted to trace the source of an embarrassing story by reporter Gérard Davet and used telephone records to pinpoint an official in the justice ministry. The official has since been removed from his post and sent to work on a project in Cayenne, the capital of French Guiana.
In the latest twist to the Bettencourt saga, it emerged yesterday that Mr Davet’s personal computer and a GPS device which contained details of his recent movements had been stolen from his Paris apartment last week.
Mr Davet said he had lodged an official complaint after his apartment was burgled last Thursday. “I realised that the laptop I use for working at home and for storing documents had disappeared, as well as the GPS,” he said.
"Nothing else was missing, even though there were valuable objects there, such as a hi-fi." In recent weeks, Le Mondehas also alleged that French officials accessed Mr Davet's mobile phone to establish whether he was in contact with one of the judges working on the Bettencourt case.
Asked if he believed the robbery was connected to his work on the Bettencourt scandal, Mr Davet said: “For the past two months, I have gone from one surprise to the next. I learned that French counter-espionage had tried to trace my sources via my mobile phone. So I’m not excluding anything with regard to this burglary, which could also be the work of a petty thief. It’s not a question of lapsing into paranoia or feeding a climate of fantasy.” The private inheritance dispute involving France’s richest woman, L’Oréal heiress Liliane Bettencourt, has led to a series of damaging allegations of illegal party financing that has hounded the government and badly weakened the labour minister, Éric Woerth, over the past four months.
Mr Davet said the authorities were engaging in intimidation and that his work had become more trying in recent weeks. “It has become very difficult, because the authorities are seeking to violate the confidentiality of journalists’ sources. So those sources are wary and provide less and less information,” he said. “It’s a form of insidious intimidation which considerably restricts our work.”