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The effort by François Hollande to get the wealthy to fund his Socialist agenda isn't off to a propitious start, needless to say. The announcement of Hollande's 75% tax rate for high-income earners has panicked the business and investment communities in France that Hollande needs to generate economic growth. It drove France's greatest living actor (and perhaps overall artist) to abandon his native country for the greener pastures of Belgium … or perhaps Russia: Gerard Depardieu, the French actor awarded Russian citizenship this month, is shopping for land near a provincial capital where he plans to settle down after a...

Nicolas Sarkozy is preparing to move to London to set up a billion pounds plus investment fund, it was claimed today. If the move goes ahead, the controversial Frenchman will become the latest to escape a potential top tax rate of 75 per cent in his home country. He and his former supermodel third wife Carla Bruni-Sarkozy would be likely to settle in an affluent district like South Kensington – so becoming the most high profile Gallic celebrity couple in the city.

The Venezuelan Minister of Correctional Services, Iris Varela, has announced on her Twitter account the expulsion of a French citizen known as Frédéric Laurent Bouquet, December 29, 2012 Mr. Bouquet (photo) had been arrested in Caracas on June 18, 2009, with three Dominican nationals in possession of an arsenal. In the apartment he had acquired, forensic police seized 500 grams of C4 explosives, 14 assault rifles including 5 with telescopic lenses, 5 with laser sighting and one with a silencer, special cables, 11 electronic detonators, 19,721 cartridges of different calibers, 3 machine guns, 4 hand guns of different calibers, 11...

A massively wealthy arms dealer with close links to Britain is set to provide proof that Nicolas Sarkozy received millions in illegal cash from Colonel Gaddafi. Ziad Takieddine, 62, insists that the former Libyan dictator funded the former French president’s election campaign in 2007. ....................... Takieddine’s explosive testament follows similar claims from other witnesses, all of whom insist that Sarkozy was a corrupt head of state. French law bans candidates from receiving cash payments above £6,300, but it is claimed that Gaddafi’s donations were laundered through bank accounts in Panama and Switzerland. An Arabic language document made public last year...

 After more than a week of wrangling over the outcome of its hotly contested party election, the leadership of France’s center-right opposition party on Monday confirmed Jean-François Copé, a right-leaning protégé of former president Nicolas Sarkozy, as the party’s new chief, staring down a last-minute legal challenge from his centrist rival, François Fillon.  The disputed election has sown confusion and embarrassment across France and in particular within the already bruised party, known as the U.M.P. The drawn-out battle, which has played out on live television and via social media networks, follows Mr. Sarkozy’s loss in the presidential race in May,...

A bitter election battle to succeed Nicolas Sarkozy as new leader of France’s main centre-Right party, UMP, has gone down to the wire in a contest that could decide whether or not the group swings farther Right. Jean-Francois Cope, the party’s firebrand secretary-general, was more than 3,000 votes ahead of the moderate Francois Fillon, with some 155,000 ballots counted from the election among the party’s 300,000 members. With the outcome still unclear, the surprise of the night was the higher-than-expected score of Mr Copé, 48, who was expected to finish well behind Mr Fillon, 58. Last night members of the...

Both candidates have claimed victory in the race to become France's next opposition leader, in a contest marred by allegations of vote-rigging. Hundreds of votes are said to separate right-wing candidate Jean-Francois Cope and ex-PM Francois Fillon. As the neck-and-neck result emerged, supporters of both UMP candidates made accusations of vote fraud. The party has been without a leader since Nicolas Sarkozy was defeated in the May presidential election. Mr Cope has been secretary general of the conservative UMP since 2010 while his rival was prime minister for five years during Mr Sarkozy's presidency. More than 50% of the party's...

  Francois Hollande will celebrate 100 days since his election as French president on Tuesday knowing his honeymoon with the electorate is over and that life is not going to get easier any time soon.   Record unemployment and an economy headed back into recession provide a sombre backdrop to an event Hollande will mark by interrupting his summer break to visit police officers in a village where two of their female colleagues died in a shootout in June. The village, Pierrefeu-du-Var, is located close to the Fort de Bregancon presidential retreat where Hollande has been on holiday with his glamorous journalist...

  The new French president, François Hollande, said Saturday that he had told those close to him to keep their private lives private and to resolve their conflicts away from the news media. Mr. Hollande, who campaigned for France’s highest office on a pledge to be “a normal president,” has been embarrassed by the evident strain between his partner, Valérie Trierweiler, and his four children, whom he fathered with a former Socialist presidential candidate, Ségolène Royal. “Private affairs are resolved in private,” Mr. Hollande said in a 45-minute, nationally televised interview on the French national holiday Bastille Day. “And I have...

French police have raided the home and offices of the former president Nicolas Sarkozy as part of an investigation into allegations of illegal campaign-financing by France's wealthiest woman. Police searched the mansion rented by Carla Bruni in a chic gated community in the west of Paris early on Tuesday morning. She and Sarkozy have lived there since their marriage, in 2008. Detectives also searched the office of the legal firm where Sarkozy is a partner and the office he moved into after losing the presidential election to the Socialist François Hollande in May. The couple were not present as they...

Jew Hunting Season Open in France by Guy Millière June 19, 2012 at 4:30 am These organizations remain blindly silent : for them, Muslims are "victims of racism" and therefore cannot be racist. France is presently prey to one of the worst waves of anti-Semitism in its history ; this wave is not receding, rather, it is intensifying. According to the annual report published by the Protection Service of the Jewish community, 2011 was a bad year; 2012 will be worse. Since the killing of three children and a rabbi in the courtyard of a school in Toulouse on...

Nicolas Sarkozy "laughed uncontrollably" when told Dominique Strauss-Kahn had been caught partaking in an orgy with prostitutes but swore his aides to silence and went on to name him IMF head, a new book claims. Les Strauss-Kahn, written by Raphaëlle Bacqué and Ariane Chemin, journalists at Le Monde, provides fresh details about Mr Sarkozy’s knowledge of Mr Strauss-Kahn’s sexual practices, his proximity to the Socialist and decision to protect his reputation. Mr Sarkozy was interior minister late in 2006 – a few months before his election to the presidency – when Alain Gardère, the public security chief of Paris, told...

Nicolas Sarkozy is said to be "bored" after spending a three-week post-election break with his wife and children in Morocco in which he was constantly on the phone to politicians back in France, according to reports. Mr Sarkozy, his wife Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, and their daughter Giulia, returned to Paris on Saturday, where he was spotted jogging in the Bois de Boulogne, after unwinding at King Mohammed VI's expense in one of his luxury private residences in Marrakesh. The Right-winger intends to remain "durably discreet" after losing to Socialist François Hollande in his presidential re-election bid on May 6, one of...

  With the right-wing UMP party predicted to lose upcoming parliamentary elections, former interior minister Brice Hortefeux and other French conservatives are embracing recently departed president Nicolas Sarkozy. As conservative leaders in France contemplate a likely defeat in parliamentary elections in June, some among them have rallied around an unlikely figure: defeated former president Nicolas Sarkozy.  The Friends of Nicolas Sarkozy Association was formally established in Paris on Wednesday, fuelling ongoing speculation about the uncertain future of France’s political right. Sarkozy, who lost the May 6 presidential runoff to Socialist rival François Hollande, repeated before and after the vote that he...

François Hollande has been sworn in as president of France, becoming the first Socialist leader in 17 years to occupy the Elysee Palace. He named close aide Jean-Marc Ayrault as his PM. Mr Hollande is now to visit Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin. Mr Hollande called for "a compromise" over the German-led focus on austerity as the way out of the eurozone crisis. Stock markets and the euro have fallen amid continuing political uncertainty in Greece. The handover of presidential power in France is a strange mixture of tradition and improvisation. There is tradition in the quasi-monarchical ceremonies, such as...

Francois Hollande was this morning sworn in as the new Socialist President of France - before getting drenched on an embarrassing open-topped drive up the Champs Elysee. The 57-year-old was inaugurated in a simple ceremony at the Elysee Palace in Paris, nine days after defeating the conservative Nicolas Sarkozy in a nationwide election. But it was during his 'triumphant' drive up France's most famous avenue that everything started to go wrong. As he poked his head out of the sunroof of a Citroen DS5, heavy rain started to pour, and there was no effort made to pull back the sunroof.

France's Hollande: Sarkozy underplayed budget woesAssociated Press – 8 hrs ago PARIS (AP) — French President-elect Francois Hollande suggested Friday that the government of outgoing leader Nicolas Sarkozy underestimated the country's budget problems and wants a new audit of France's books. But Hollande, a Socialist elected Sunday to lead the world's fifth-biggest economy, said that wouldn't hurt his ability to fulfill campaign pledges. Those include higher taxes on the rich, thousands of new teaching jobs and freezes on some government spending. And Hollande stuck to his own deficit reduction goals despite new European Union figures released Friday that paint a...

He  swapped her for a younger woman.  Then she tried to stop him becoming president of France. But Francois Hollande is on course to make former partner Segolene Royal the most powerful female politician in the country, despite the bitterness of their separation after 30 years and four children together.  President-elect Mr Hollande and fellow Socialist Miss Royal still have their personal differences and she does not get on with his current partner Valerie Trierweiler, a journalist 11 years her junior. Only last year, while Mr Hollande and his former partner were contesting the Socialist nomination for the presidency, Miss...

It turns out that left wingers really do believe in unicorns. Even in France. François Hollande has defeated Nicolas Sarkozy in the French Presidential election. Honestly, sometimes it's not easy to take the French people seriously. Hollande made a number of campaign promises, including Hollande wants to renegotiate a hard-won European treaty on budget cuts that Germany's Angela Merkel and Sarkozy had championed. He wants more government stimulus, and more government spending in general despite concerns from markets that France needs to urgently trim its huge debts. and Hollande’s win represents a groundshift in European politics; with a socialist president,...

Socialist candidate Francois Hollande has won the French election as expected. His high-tax, pro-stimulus, welfare-state-protection platform, in effect, scuttles the Eurozone rescue program engineered by Merkel and a reluctant Sarkozy. Hollande’s election leaves the European Union with three stark choices, none of which are good: 1) Germany and the European Central Bank cave and bail out any and all debtor countries under the cover of some fictitious future fiscal discipline, or 2) The Eurozone countries muddle along from one band-aid fix to the next as the bond vigilantes breathe down their necks while they hope to catch a break, or...