THE French Finance Minister has quit his luxurious apartment in Paris for humbler lodgings after a newspaper reported that the state was paying £9,700 a month to house him and his family in style.
Jean-Pierre Raffarin, Prime Minister of the centre-right Government, moved swiftly to show the door to Hervé Gaymard, a favourite of the President known as “baby Chirac”, after Le Canard Enchaîné, the investigative weekly, reported that he had taken up residence in a 600sq m flat in Paris’s “golden triangle”.
News that the state was paying so much for the Gaymards and their eight children to live between the Champs Elysées and the ultra-chic Avenue Montaigne was deemed a serious embarrassment for a Government that is preaching sacrifice in order to cut public spending.
Only last Sunday M Gaymard, a reformist free- marketeer who succeeded Nicolas Sarkozy in the finance post in December, had told his compatriots that “we have to break the habit of spending public money”.
At first he defended the flat, saying that he worked a 120-hour week and needed the space. But on Wednesday night he agreed to leave “because of the media fuss and my notion of serving the state”.
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Yesterday he conceded that he “should have been more careful” about the flat, which had been chosen for his large family by his office. “It is true that I did not take personal care of this matter and I consider that to have been an error,” he said. His wife, Clara, also a senior state official, denied reports that the couple employed six maids, butlers and other servants at state expense.
Most ministers are housed by the state in official residences or in commercial flats. President Chirac has been lodged free in luxurious official flats and houses for nearly three decades.
M Raffarin issued new rules requiring those in flats to move out or pay the difference if they occupied space greater than 80sq m for a couple, with an additional 20sq m per child. Three junior ministers said they would pay up rather than move.
The most surprising aspect of the episode was the speed of the Government’s reaction after Le Canard Enchaîné broke the story on Wednesday.
Scandals over subsidised housing have plagued politicians of both Right and the Left but most have resisted moving until put under heavy pressure.
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Alain Juppé, the former Prime Minister, left a heavily subsidised Left Bank flat in 1995 only after he received a warning from a state prosecutor that he was committing an offence. Le Monde said that M Gaymard should have understood that times had changed.