Gabon's late president, Omar Bongo Ondimba, funnelled money into Jacques Chirac's 1981 presidential campaign, according to Valerie Giscard d'Estaing, the former French president – an allegation that Mr Chirac dismissed yesterday as "totally unfounded".
In a startling new claim concerning France's murky past ties with African leaders, Mr Giscard said the 73-year old Gabonese premier who died on Monday spent years building up a "very questionable financial network", and that he had broken off ties with him when he allegedly helped fund Mr Chirac's bid for the presidency.
"As you know, we don't accept foreign funds to support candidates in France," Mr Giscard said in a radio interview, recalling the 1981 campaign when he was seeking a second presidential term.
"I learned that Bongo was financially supporting Jacques Chirac," Mr Giscard alleged.
"I called Bongo and told him 'you're supporting my rival's campaign' and there was a dead silence that I still remember to this day and then he said 'Ah, you know about it', which was extraordinary.
"From that moment on, I broke off personal relations with him," said Mr Giscard, who went on to lose to Francois Mitterrand, his Socialist rival, in a run-off vote in 1981.
Mr Chirac dismissed the allegations yesterday as "totally unfounded."
"They spring from a mediocre row," he said.
Mr Giscard, who lost a presidential run-off in 1981 to François Mitterrand, has never forgiven Mr Chirac for failing to call on his supporters to vote for him. The two have barely been on speaking terms since, and ignore each other when they meet at France's constitutional council – open to all ex-presidents.
Mr Chirac was yesterday defended by his former prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, who said it was pointless looking for "scapegoats or explanations for a past defeat".
Charles Pasqua, another former Chirac aide, said he had no knowledge of illegal party financing from Mr Bongo's coffers.
"I have never heard, including from Bongo, that he helped finance someone's campaign It must be a sign of age," said the former interior minister, who was cleared of charges in a vast corruption case involving the formerly state-owned oil giant Elf.
During the 2003 trial, Elf's former chief testified about huge Elf slush funds used to finance French political parties.
Mr Bongo, who ruled oil-rich Gabon for more than four decades, had come to symbolise "la FrançAfrique" – France's shadowy system of maintaining huge control over African leaders in former colonies through a web of opaque dealings.
Nicolas Sarkozy promised to develop a more transparent relationship with African leaders. His first port of call in Africa after winning the presidency, however, was to Gabon to see Mr Bongo, whom he described this week as a "great and loyal friend of France." "He was a president who didn't care about his citizens," said Eva Joly, a former investigating magistrate in the Elf inquiry and now a euro MP.
"He served France's interests and French politicians well."
"The oil boom did not benefit the Gabonese. It benefited us. France has a great debt toward Gabon for having kept Bongo in power all these years," she said.
The controversy shifted to the Left yesterday, as one Socialist parliamentarian said that Mr Bongo had bankrolled numerous electoral campaigns both Right and Left.
"We heard about it. Alas, I'm afraid it was a little true," said André Vallini, adding that François Mitterrand's two presidential terms "were not perfectly clear" regarding his ties to Africa.
Credit: The Telegraph
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