L'Escroc's buddy Charles Pasqua has been placed under judicial investigation in France for his part on the Iraq Oil for Palaces scandal. Pasqua blames the entire thing on Bush and his fiendish neocon administration who are, so he claims, out to get him in order to embarrass l'Escroc. As the BBC reports he denies all the charges:
Mr Pasqua has denied the allegations, which he had said were part of a US bid to discredit President Jacques Chirac.
He said his lawyers would immediately contest the accusations.
Mr Pasqua told AFP news agency that he had "never touched a single oil voucher".
This defence sounds remarkably similar to that of his alleged fellow beneficiary George "I have never owned a barrel of oil in my life" Galloway and is probably equally disingenuous in that while it may be correct such a statement does not rule out the possibility of benefitting financially from Iraqi oil.
Furthermore his claim about US pressure quite simply rings hollow. This is not some sort of UN or US investigation, it is an investigation by the French authorities - in fact the people who were his underlings when he was Minister of the Interior. It is not at all beyond the bounds of possibility that someone else (e.g. a prominent French politician and minister whose name begins with S) is seeking to discredit l'Escroc via Pasqua but it seems far more likely that this is the French judiciary doing this themselves because they have evidence that a crime has been committed. Many observers both within and outside France have criticised the French judiciary for not going after corrupt politicians and while that does seem to be changing - these days practically every week some mayor or other seems to get caught taking bribes - there is still a good deal of room for improvement in the investigation of national figures.
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