Shady deals, funding scandals rock France

(Anil Netto) All is not well in the state of France as some hard questions are being asked of the leadership about kickbacks and other funding scandals.
The BBC has a story: ‘How ‘rotten’ is France’s politics’?

One pending inquiry, involving the sale of submarines to Pakistan in 1994 when Mr Sarkozy was budget minister, may come back to haunt the president.
The irony is that the explosion of funding scandals in the past two decades has coincided with unprecedented attempts to clean up France’s political life.
It began in the late 1980s, when it was revealed that the then-governing socialists – among others – had set up bogus consultancies to collect kickbacks from firms bidding for public contracts and channel the cash back to party coffers.

Allegations of kickbacks on the sale of French submarines to Pakistan have surfaced as well. The  French President’s office, however. described the media reports as “nonsense” and “grotesque”. The Hindustan Times has the story here.