The wife of the mayor of Paris goes to Mass every day and takes her rosary beads when she is questioned by magistrates. Jean and Xaviere Tiberi, from the same central Corsican village and married since 1958, are devoted to one another. "Jean is a saint. He will be beatified," Xaviere said tearfully when the couple appeared recently on prime time television. When she is not praying or crying, she smiles all the time, a big, toothy grin. Her hair is pulled back in a neat little chignon, and she hides her matronly figure with conservative suits. ("No matter what Xaviere Tiberi wears, she always looks like a Corsican widow," the political commentator Catherine Ney says.) Could Xaviere Tiberi really be the most dangerous woman in France?
On Monday, Xaviere Tiberi will go on trial for misappropriation of public funds at Evry, the main town in the Essonne region outside Paris. Neither she nor her husband thought it could happen. Jacques Chirac was the mayor of Paris from 1977 until he became president in 1995, when he handpicked his retainer of many years, Jean Tiberi, to succeed him. In 1996, close Chirac aides went literally to the ends of the Earth - dispatching a helicopter to the Himalayas - to try to save Xaviere from prosecution.
Now Xaviere and Jean are tired of being treated like the Ceausescus. They feel betrayed by Chirac's Gaullist Rally for the Republic (RPR), and they are threatening to tell all they know about the "Bermuda Triangle" that runs from the Elysee presidential palace to the RPR headquarters in the rue de Lille to the Hotel de Ville which the party has held for the past 27 years.
Xaviere's real government salary for a fake job - along with 44 other people, among them RPR wives, maids and mistresses - is only the most visible fraction of the political party machine that put Chirac in power. As Liberation newspaper said recently, Xaviere Tiberi is like a woman who goes into a bank claiming she has a bomb in her hand-bag. Does she really have a bomb, or is she bluffing?
Since 1994, Judge Eric Halphen has been investigating Jean Tiberi for corruption as president of the Paris municipality's appropriately named low-income housing organisation OPAC (pronounced like "opaque" in French). Witnesses have testified that OPAC awarded city contracts in exchange for contributions to the RPR, and Jean Tiberi was formally indicted for soliciting bribes last June. In an earlier scandal, it emerged that the city provided luxury apartments at subsidised rent to RPR faithful, including the former prime minister Alain Juppe and the Tiberis' two children.
Xaviere's troubles began in June 1996, when Judge Halphen searched the Tiberis' Place du Pantheon apartment in connection with the OPAC investigation. Halphen discovered Xaviere Tiberi's pay stubs from March to December 1994, when she was paid 21,000 French francs a month (£2,530) by the Essonne regional council. She admitted that she never set foot there, but said she had drafted a report for the president of the council, an ambitious young RPR politician named Xavier Dugoin.
The now infamous 36-page report, for which she received £25,300, was entitled "The orientations of the Essonne general council regarding decentralised co-operation". It was riddled with typing errors and was largely plagiarised from other texts. Xaviere Tiberi forgot the name of the RPR party supporter who typed it. Judge Halphen suspected it was slapped together later, to justify the payments.
The Tiberis were relieved when the case was given to the Evry prosecutor Laurent Davenas, a friend of Dugoin who had "hired" Xaviere. But four months later, when Davenas was off trekking on holiday in the Himalayas, his replacement decided to launch a full-scale investigation into Mrs T's phoney employment. In panic, the then French justice minister Jacques Toubon - who has since become the Tiberis' arch enemy - asked the French ambassador in Nepal to find Davenas so that he could cancel the investigation. Davenas returned to his mountain shelter one night to hear that a helicopter had come looking for him. He thought it was a joke.
Investigators found that Xaviere Tiberi was not alone in benefiting from Dugoin's generosity. The RPR politician dreamed of a cabinet position, so he shared the regional council's money with prominent Gaullists. Dugoin also put his daughter-in-law, wife, cleaning lady and the mother-in-law of a close friend on the government payroll - and spent 230,000 French francs (£27,710) in government funds on air tickets for family holidays. He is appealing his 18-month suspended sentence and 300,000 French francs fine, and will be in court again with Xaviere Tiberi on Monday, along with two other of his former "employees". The other 42 phantom workers confessed months ago, paid back the money and were let off.
Another scandal involving fake jobs threatens President Chirac more directly, and is being investigated by Judge Patrick Desmures of Nanterre. For the last seven years of Chirac's reign as mayor of Paris, at least 40 RPR party workers were paid either by private companies eager to win his favour or from the municipal budget. By the Canard Enchaine's calculations, the scam saved the president's party a million pounds a year in salaries.
In what smelt like blatant crossparty back-scratching, the president of the Constitutional Council, Roland Dumas, ruled earlier this year that Chirac cannot be investigated while he holds France's highest office. No one had asked the council for the decision, and it seemed more than a coincidence that Chirac had earlier supported the former socialist foreign minister Dumas, whose longtime mistress received tens of millions of francs in "salary" from the state-owned oil company Elf-Acquitaine.
As Xaviere Tiberi goes on trial, her husband Jean also faces new revelations in a 10-year-old investigation into vote-rigging. After Chirac lost the 1988 presidential election, the RPR wanted to ensure a "grand slam" victory in all 20 Paris districts in the municipal elections. To do so, according to dozens of new depositions, they registered thousands of city employees (real ones), RPR supporters - even Vietnamese immigrants and Algerian harkis - in districts where they did not actually live and where the RPR risked losing. In a lawsuit regarding vote-rigging in the 1997 legislative election, Dumas's Constitutional Council last year ruled that although Jean Tiberi had cheated in his 5th arrondissement, he would have won anyway - so his election to the national assembly was upheld!
It doesn't take a degree in political science to understand that fake invoices for real party contributions, fake jobs for real salaries and fake voter registrations in real elections adds up to sham democracy and theft from the French taxpayer.
Xaviere Tiberi now claims the case against her has been fabricated by Jacques Toubon - whose own career was ruined by sending that helicopter to the Himalayas. The Evry trial could degenerate into a giant RPR mudfight. Xaviere Tiberi will probably be fined. And after controlling the Paris town hall since 1977, the RPR will probably lose to the socialists in the 2001 municipal elections. None of which will help Chirac in the 2002 presidential battle.
