President Sarkozy came under attack for alleged links with high-level corporate sleaze yesterday after one of his closest friends and the chief of the Airbus airliner company were implicated in multimillion-pound insider trading.

The Socialist opposition called for Mr Sarkozy to explain his past actions in government after news that the French stock market watchdog, AMF, had found that senior executives had profited from “massive” illicit share deals at EADS, the Franco-German parent company of Airbus.

“We have here a mafia system at the highest level of state,” a Socialist spokesman said.

Among 21 EADS executives at the heart of the affair are Thomas Enders, the German chief of Airbus, and Arnaud Lagardère, Mr Sarkozy’s friend, who is head of the Lagardère aerospace and media conglomerate.

At the time of the alleged insider trading, in late 2005 and early 2006, the two businessmen were joint chief executives and co-chairmen of EADS.

Mr Lagardère says that he was “like a brother” to the President.

The affair is embarrassing for Mr Sarkozy as he has been trying to persuade workers to accept 10,000 job cuts as part of Airbus’s rescue plan.

Unions reacted with fury to the suggestion that the top management had been lining their pockets while keeping the company’s troubles secret.

The eruption of the first big financial scandal in his presidency will hinder Mr Sarkozy’s attempts to shed his image as a chum of billionaires and big business.

The opposition and his other critics routinely attack him for what they perceive as his unhealthy closeness to France’s richest tycoons.

He is potentially vulnerable because he was Interior Minister when, it emerged yesterday, the Government was told that Airbus was in trouble and it should sell some of its 15 percent holding before the share price fell.

Profits of about €90 million were made in 1,200 trades with inside knowledge, according to the AMF, which has handed its report to prosecutors.

The share price plummeted 17 per cent in a day in June last year after Airbus revealed the extent of losses because of poor management of its programme for the A380 giant airliner.

Thierry Breton, the Finance Minister at the time, said yesterday that the state had not sold shares, but neither had it objected to the sale of shares by Mr Lagardère and other insiders.

Noël Forgeard, the chief of Airbus at the time, and his children exercised stock options in the company at a profit of ¤2.5 million in March 2006, according to AMF records.

The recent disclosure of this transaction caused public outrage and bolstered Mr Sarkozy’s plans for curbing stock options. Measures are to be announced this week.

All involved deny wrongdoing and Lagardère said that it would sue those who leaked the preliminary report — subsequently confirmed by officials — which was first published by Le Figaro newspaper.

The affair threatens new turbulence for Airbus just as it is pulling out of a 15-month slump. It is about to hand over to Singapore Airlines the first A380 airliner.

The big shareholders and executives who cashed in before the slump were fully aware of delays in the A380 months before they were made public, investigators allege.

They also report suspicions over the “odd” method used by the Lagardère company and DaimlerChrysler, the two biggest shareholders, to reduce their holdings by delaying the transaction until this year, but with a value fixed at the pre-slump level.

Trade unions said they were “sickened and disgusted” by what appeared to be an operation by top management and shareholders to feather their nests before reporting bad news that would result in thousands of redundancies.

“This is not a trifling affair. We’re talking about tens of millions of euros of profit in a sector that is strategic for France and Europe,” Jean-Christophe Le Duigou, the national secretary of the CGT trade union, said.

The AMF report is in the hands of the prosecutor and judges who opened their investigation in November.

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