THE FRENCH-AMERICAN FOUNDATION WEEKLY BRIEF

France

The online news site Mediapart published an interview with embattled L’Oréal heiress Liliane Bettencourt‘s former accountant, Claire Thibout, claiming that as a presidential candidate, President Sarkozy (among others) had received thousands of euros in illegal campaign contributions from Bettencourt. In later talks with French investigators, Thibout partly recanted her claims. Sarkozy has denied any involvement-along with his labor minister, Eric Woerth, whose wife worked for the company managing Bettencourt’s money-and the head of Sarkozy’s UMP party accused Mediapart of “fascist methods,” according to Le Point. 20minutes.fr blamed the Bettencourt scandal for a recent drop in Sarkozy’s popularity, with polls predicting a potential loss to Socialist Martine Aubry in the 2012 presidential election.

A French court sentenced former Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega to seven years in prison on charges that he used French bank accounts to launder 2.3 million Euros in Columbian drug money. After serving a 20-year sentence in the United States on drug trafficking charges, Noriega remained in prison in Miami for another 32 months fighting extradition to France. That additional time will be deducted from his current sentence, meaning he could be eligible for parole within a year.

President Sarkozy and Prime Minister François Fillon asked Overseas Development Minister Alain Joyandet and Greater Paris Minister Christian Blanc to resign amid criticism over spending excesses, the BBC reported. Joyandet recently spent 116,500 Euros on a private jet to Haiti and Blanc spent 12,000 Euros on cigars. The Los Angeles Times characterized the forced resignations as a largely symbolic gesture during a time of deep spending cuts and calls for economic sacrifices from the general French populace.

After losing a billion Euros in 2009, the SNCF announced plans to grow its business by 28 percent (i.e., 39 billion Euros) by 2015, according to 20minutes.fr. In order to increase revenue, the rail operating is considering launching a low-cost TGV service. Connexion said the proposed plan would be based on the existing idTGV model, which offers discounts for early ticket purchases, and would ask the government to relax rules requiring the SNCF to reserve seats for families, politicians, and army workers.  L’Humanité wondered if the “low-cost” plan wasn’t merely a “smoke-screen” for future price hikes on other TGV services.

The French Supreme Court ruled on Thursday, July 8, to recognize a French woman as the adoptive parent of her lesbian partner’s daughter, born by artificial insemination in 1999. The adoptive parent (known only as Madame B.), a French doctor now living in the United States with her American doctor partner, had already obtained parental status from a Georgia court, and first sought French recognition of that status in 2007. That request was turned down by the tribunal de grande instance de Paris in 2007 and again by an appeals court in 2008. Rue89 called Thursday’s ruling a historic precedent for gay couples seeking adoptive rights. French law currently does not allow for adoption by the second parent in a homosexual couple.