L'affaire Clearstream: Gergorin's the corbeau

Well, this didn't take too long:
Gergorin, EADS VP, admitted he's the secret informant, known up to now as "le corbeau" (the crow), that wrote the anonymous letter:

Identity of 'the crow' revealed in Clearstream affair
A MYSTERY at the heart of a scandal shaking the French Government was cleared up today when a senior aerospace executive admitted that he had written an anonymous letter alerting prosecutors to apparent corruption among politicians.

The confession to Le Parisien by Jean-Louis Gergorin, 60, a vice-president of the EADS aerospace giant, confirmed the identity of the so-called "crow", the anonymous writer who sent a list of bank accounts to an investigating judge in 2004.
. . .
M Gergorin’s letter, which was followed by others, triggered a judicial investigation that found the bank list to be a fabrication. This cleared Nicolas Sarkozy, the Interior Minister, and other senior politicians of holding illicit accounts with the Clearstream financial house in Luxembourg.

Since then the case has unravelled into a murky tale of double-dealing among the Chirac administration, secret agents and the close-knit Paris power elite. At the very least, a smear campaign against M Sarkozy was apparently exploited by Dominique de Villepin, the Prime Minister, and by President Chirac.

It has emerged over the past month that M de Villepin knew about the Clearstream list months before the anonymous letter and that he ordered a senior intelligence officer to investigate it at a meeting attended by M Gergorin, an old Foreign Ministry colleague of his, in January 2004.

The plot has thickened with the revelation that M Gergorin had already outlined the contents of the letter to its recipient, Judge Renaud Van Ruymbeke, at an earlier meeting. M Gergorin and the judge have now confirmed that they agreed to using an anonymous letter to avoid formal procedures.

Which of course got the judge in trouble,

Judge Van Ruymbeke, one of France’s most feared investigating magistrates, failed to tell colleagues that he knew the "crow’s" identity, causing them to waste a year looking for him. He is now under investigation and was questioned yesterday by judiciary inspectors.

However, Gergorin refused to say if he was also behind a subsequent letter that falsely implicated Nicolas Sarkozy.

(technorati tags Clearstream, France, Politics, Jacques Chirac, Dominique de Villepin, Nicolas Sarkozy, UMP)