President Flosse escapes jail, for now

PAPEETE – The French Polynesian president Gaston Flosse has been given a reprieve from a jail sentence after a ruling by a Papeete court.

However, a judge at France’s highest court has given a strong signal that French Polynesia’s president Gaston Flosse may fail in his bid to overturn another corruption sentence, and therefore risks losing office next month.

The Court Of Appeal in Tahiti this week quashed a referral order in the corruption case involving Flosse and the French advertising executive Hubert Haddad.

In January, the criminal court gave the two a five-year prison sentence and a US$110,000 fine for corruption.

The appeal court has now declared the earlier verdict null and void.

Haddad had been accused of paying about two million US dollars in kickbacks over 12 years to Flosse and his party to get public sector contracts from the OPT telecommunications company.

But lawyers for the president and the other accused called for the referral order to be quashed saying the accusations against their clients were too imprecise.

Last year, the defendants failed in their bid to get France’s highest court to move the appeal case away from Tahiti after claiming they wouldn’t get a fair trial.

In February last year, the veteran politician was given a four-month suspended jail sentence, a US$170,000 US dollar fine and banned from public office for three years for running a network of so-called phantom jobs within the presidency in the 1990s in what has been the biggest case of its kind in French legal history.

His lawyers appealed against the sentence but thehigh court judge, Gilles Lacan, says the offences are obvious and the law has to be applied across the republic.

Lacan says the Flosse network was of a scale as if Francois Hollande ran his presidency with a staff of 150,000.

Flosse has denied any wrongdoing, saying contracts of his presidency were approved by the French authorities.

A verdict is expected to be released in a month.