An investigative judge questioned Jacques Chirac, the former French President, for four hours yesterday over a financing scandal that emerged from his years as Mayor of Paris and leader of the Gaullist party.

Mr Chirac, 74, issued his first public explanation over the affair that dogged his 12 years in the presidency. Implicitly acknowledging his involvement, he said that all French parties resorted to irregular sources for funds until rules were set in the 1990s.

Investigators have waited for years to talk to Mr Chirac about how much he knew about the millions of pounds that were siphoned illicitly from the city treasury and commercial companies when he was mayor from 1977-95. During his presidency, immunity shielded him from inquiries.

A dozen of his former subordinates — including Alain Juppé, who later served as Prime Minister — were convicted in 2004 for their part in a scheme under which the salaries of party officials were paid by the council and companies doing business with it.

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The chance that Jacques Chirac will ever be convicted of anything are thought to be extremely slim

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Judge Alain Philibeaux spent four hours at Mr Chirac’s Left Bank office. No French leader since Philippe Pétain, the head of the collaborationist Vichy state, who was tried for treason in 1945, has been questioned in a criminal inquiry.

Mr Chirac was questioned as a material witness in the presence of Jean Veil, his lawyer. “The former head of state explained himself very completely, very calmly, in a climate of great courtesy and simplicity,” Mr Veil said. A material witness is one who faces the possibility of prosecution.

In a column for Le Monde newspaper, Mr Chirac said that all parties turned a blind eye to financing irregularities in the 1980s and early 1990s. It was the custom for Left and Right to raise money from “private firms and even public budgets”, he wrote. “It was in this period up to the law of 1995, marked by an explosion of financial needs and the inefficacy of the existing fragmentary rules, that the so-called party funding scandals took place.

“In a spirit of clarity and responsibility, I want to remind the judges of this context, without which nothing can be understood,” he added.

Senior officials in the Socialist party and centrist groups were convicted in the early 1990s for fraudulent funding via business donations to dummy companies. Mr Chirac’s Rassemblement pour la République, as his neo-Gaullist movement was called, drew its funds largely from the city hall fiddles of the time. Mr Chirac faces possible investigation in three other cases arising from his mayoral years.

Corruption claims

— Fraudulent payments were allegedly made to members of Mr Chirac’s RPR party

— Forty bogus jobs were allegedly given to members of RPR when Mr Chirac was Mayor

— Guy Legris, former head of the Paris RPR, is under investigation over embezzlement allegations

— Investigation started in 1997 into the misuse of public funds at the city’s printers

— Investigation started in 2003 into suspected employment of city gardeners for work in elected officials’ private gardens between 1983 and 2001

— Property developer Jean-Claude Méry accused Mr Chirac of corruption in a video released after his death in 1999. He claimed that Mr Chirac received £500,000 in kickbacks

Source: Times research

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