Chirac Found Guilty, Sentenced

Preview of things to come here in the States?

A French court has given former President Jacques Chirac a two-year suspended prison sentence for diverting public funds and abusing public trust.

Mr Chirac, 79, was not in court to hear the verdict because of ill-health but denied wrongdoing.

President from 1995 to 2007, he was put on trial on charges that dated back to his time as mayor of Paris.

He was accused of paying members of his Rally for the Republic (RPR) party for municipal jobs that did not exist.

The prosecution had urged the judge to acquit Mr Chirac and nine others accused in the trial. Two of the nine were cleared. The other seven were found guilty and all but one handed suspended prison sentences.

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The case was divided into two parts: the first count involved embezzlement and breach of trust in relation to 21 bogus jobs; the second related to a charge of illegal conflict of interest concerning seven jobs.

He was found guilty of both.

The former president, who had legal immunity during his time as head of state, faced a potential 10 years in prison and a fine of 150,000 euros for the employment of more than 20 bogus officials.

“Jacques Chirac has breached the duty of probity required for public officials, to the detriment of the public interest of Parisians,” said tribunal judge, Dominique Pauthe.

Bernie Reeves, at American Thinker, unleashes a hungry Rottweiler brace of a tirade against Obama’s corruption coddling administration and the Congress:

At least CBS’s 60 Minutes is on to the national fury at the fact that the criminals who brought down the American economy have not been identified personally and brought before the bar of justice. But a week after a broadcast that bored in on the issue, interviewer Steve Croft let Barack Obama off the hook when the president disingenuously stated that the financial shenanigans by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and banking firms were legal — that his administration was instrumental in passing new regulations encompassed in the Dodd-Frank legislation to prevent it happening again.

Wait a minute. It is now known that Fannie and Freddie, the government-connected mortgage-packaging giants, threw out the qualifications to allow home-ownership for all, an idealistic social goal pushed by Democrats — from Jimmy Carter via the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 to Bill Clinton in the 1990s, who enlisted ACORN to badger banks to make bad loans to minorities, and then to Rep. Barney Frank and his fellow travelers in the 2000s, who put the full weight of the Congress behind the creation of bad mortgage loans.

The large investment and commercial banks saw an opportunity and concocted securities backed by dicey “sub-prime” loans, in which borrowers paid higher interest based on questionable credit. These mortgage-backed instruments were a hot item, yet when the banks learned that the underlying values had vanished, they lent money to mortgage origination firms to gin up even more bad loans at higher and higher interest rates to shape into even more mortgage-backed securities to sell to their customers — and each other.

Right there criminal fraud is manifest, contradicting Obama’s claim that the scam was legal. But there was more. The banks, knowing that the instruments were worthless when they sold them to their own clients, purposefully bought “insurance” (credit default swaps) against their own products, thus doubly swindling their customers. And they made millions doing it — first on the commissions from the sale, and then from their short position as the securities tanked. In 2008, the house of cards came tumbling down, taking with it the American economy.

Chirac is small potatoes.

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