Murder trial probes Giscard-era scandals

Press, 14 November 1981, Page 9

Murder trial probes Giscard-era scandals

By

PAUL WEBSTER,

of the

“Observer” Paris After five years of scandal and speculation, the alleged murderers of Prince Jean de Broglie, aged 55, have gone on trial in Paris in what looks like being a judgment on a whole political era. De Broglie, a corrupt former Minister who joined with the former President Valery Giscard d’Estaing in founding the Independent Republican Party, was shot dead in the street on Christmas Eve, 1976. As the twomonth hearing starts, the most important question is not who killed him but whether Mr Giscard's Administration was an accomplice.

Among the witnesses are the Interior Minister at the time, Michel Poniatowski. the former President’s closest confidant, and the heads of all the main police forces. They will be asked to explain why the police called off protection for de Broglie, a relative of the President, although they had been informed three months before of the murder plot.

With the Socialist Administration in power, there is the possibility that the trial will break through the wall of silence that could not be pierced, even by a’ parliamentary commission, under the previous regime. About 140 witnesses are being called and 10,000 documents are to be produced. The de Broglie affair has been riddled with official cover-ups since he died as he walked with some of his underworld business associates in the Rue des Dardeneiles in Paris. Within a week. Mr Poniatowski. sur-

rounded by his top police chiefs, called a press conference saying the murder had been rapidly cleared up. The gunman, Gerard Freche, aged 31, a smalltime crook, had shot the Government deputy for a $lO,OOO fee on behalf of two crooked associates of de Broglie — Pierre de Varga, aged 59, and Patrick de Ribemont, aged 44. Allegedly they owed him $700,000 and his death wiped out the debt. Mr Poniatowski's press conference was the blunder that alerted the press to deeper implications. De Broglie, who signed the peace agreement between France and Algeria for de Gaulle, came from a noble Norman family which had given two Prime Ministers and a Nobel prize-winner to France. Largely through the investigative work of the satirical weekly. “Le Canard Enchaine." it became known that a police inspector, Guy Simone, aged 33, allegedly hired the assassin and that the police had been tipped off about the assassination plot three months before the killing. Two weeks before the deputy was killed, all surveillance was called off and investigations into de Broglie's business deals stopped. Earlier this year, just before the presidential election in which Mr Giscard was defeated, “Le‘ Canard Enchaine" published documents proving its story that police chiefs had been officially alerted to the plot. The police went back on earlier

statements that they had not been informed but still said they had not passed on the information to Mr Poniatowski, who was responsible for the police. The fact that the murdered former Minister was' a relative of Mr Giscard stretched public credibility on these denials to the limit. A month ago. a plot was unearthed to try to kill de Varga, the principal accused, in his prison. His doctor, Nelly Azerad, aged 54, who will be tried for giving de Varga a false alibi, is charged with the new murder plot. It has also been alleged that two failed attempts to murder de Broglie were made outside the doctor’s house.

Although no clear picture has yet been given of de Broglie's business dealings, it is well established that he began to lose money heavily in 1968 with the collapse of an arms company in Luxemburg.

By the early 1970 s he was causing acute embarrassment to his political colleagues as another fortune was lost in an obscure affair involving the Sicilian Mafia. Later he joined forces with de Ribemont and de Varga.

With them, his name was linked to two multi-million dollar forgeries involving government funds. A year before his death, de Broglie borrowed about $3 million in a desperate effort to save his family estates. What happened to that money is only one more riddle in the vast mystery.