Sarkozy, political foe face off in court

CLARIFICATION: An earlier version of this story did not identify Jean-Louis Gergorin as vice-president of EADS.

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PARIS | Former French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin goes on trial Monday on charges of trying to use a bogus list of secret bank-account holders to smear President Nicolas Sarkozy at a time when the two were political archrivals.

The trial promises to be a potboiler of the first order, with a cast of characters and a witness list that include senior intelligence officers, journalists, past and present ministers, a leading defense contractor and a bookish computer hacker who is also a self-proclaimed spy.

Mr. de Villepin, a debonair former diplomat and Napoleon Bonaparte buff, is best known outside France for his dramatic speeches at the United Nations against the invasion of Iraq. His surprise announcement of French opposition in early 2003 was labeled an “ambush” by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell.

The case revolves around documents that were stolen eight years ago from the Luxembourg financial clearing house, Clearstream, containing a list of accounts purportedly used to launder money.

The list ended up in the hands of a senior executive at EADS, the giant French manufacturer of combat aircraft and Airbus passenger planes, and he passed it to his friend, Mr. de Villepin.

Along the way, according to prosecutors, an EADS employee doctored the list by adding the names of Mr. Sarkozy and at least 40 other prominent business and political figures. Mr. de Villepin is accused of allowing the tampered list to leak and circulate despite his knowledge that it was a fake. He faces up to five years in prison.

Jean-Claude Marin, the chief Paris prosecutor, called the case a “complex operation of extraordinary scope” and Mr. de Villepin its chief “collateral beneficiary.”

Mr. Sarkozy will not be present but will have his lawyers at the trial of his old nemesis. He filed a slander lawsuit in 2006, when the fakery became public, making him a civil plaintiff in the proceedings.

Slander lawsuits have also been filed by 40 other French business and political figures across the political spectrum whose names appeared on the forged list of account holders.

Among them is Dominique Strauss-Kahn, at the time a potential Socialist contender for the French presidency who is now the managing director of the International Monetary Fund.

The Clearstream trial, sometimes described as the French Watergate, promises to replay the vicious infighting that characterized the last years in office of President Jacques Chirac, when Mr. Sarkozy and Mr. de Villepin were ministers and angling to succeed him.

The two men rose in politics by different paths. Mr. de Villepin, who has never run for office, was a Chirac protege, the son of a French senator and a graduate of the country’s elite schools.

Mr. Sarkozy, a lawyer and the son of a Hungarian immigrant, is a scrappy political infighter who won his first elective office at age 23 and portrays himself as the counter-elite.

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