Allegations of Vote-rigging Haunt Chirac

A public prosecutor in Paris said yesterday that 12 past and present officials from Jacques Chirac's UMP party would appear in court next year after allegations of vote-rigging in the capital in the days when the French president was its mayor.

In a 196-page report which could further damage Mr Chirac's reputation, the prosecutor said the officials, including the former mayor of the third arrondissement, Jacques Dominati, and his two sons, should be tried for "fraudulently influencing" the outcome of a poll.

The case is the first to come to court of two electoral fraud investigations dating back to the 18 years that Mr Chirac was mayor, up until 1995. During that time, according to six sleaze investigations, city hall became a springboard for his presidential ambitions, with local taxpayers footing the bill.

The prosecutor, François Cordier, said two vote-rigging scams had been coordinated from Paris city hall.

He said a leading city hall administrator had "personally ensured" council staff who voted for the RPR (which later became the UMP) were illegally registered in the third arrondissement to ensure that Mr Chirac won all 20 Paris arrondissements in 1989.

Mr Cordier said the investi gation into the alleged scam had shown that in the 1989 city elections, 327 voters on the arrondissement's electoral list - friends and relatives of the Dominatis, council employees, restaurateurs, activists from the RPR and 63 refuse collectors - did not live there, and 266 of them had voted.

"This indisputably favoured the election of Jacques Dominati as mayor as early as the first round, because he obtained the absolute majority by just 20 votes," Mr Cordier said.

Mr Chirac is immune from prosecution or even questioning while head of state. But the possible conviction for electoral fraud of close political allies such as Mr Dominati and Jean Tiberi, the mayor of the fifth arrondissement who is targeted in a near-identical investigation, would prove an embarrassment, at the least.

Police said they had nearly completed the parallel investigation into events in the fifth arrondissement, where 3,315 phantom voters have reportedly been identified, including people who died many years previously and others at non-existent addresses.

Meanwhile, it emerged yesterday that expenditure by the Elysée palace has increased hugely since Mr Chirac was elected president in 1995.

The revelation came a day after French MPs approved a 2005 presidential budget of €31.9m (£22m). The daily Le Monde said in 1994, the final year of François Mitterrand's presidency, that the Elysée had spent (in equivalent terms) €3.3m.

Allegations of runaway spending under Mr Chirac are not new and were countered yesterday by his office, which said the budget increase was mainly due to a shortfall due to the abolition, in 2001, of the "special funds", an unaudited and hidden multi-million-pound slush fund that the French state allocated itself for "extraordinary expenses". Income to offset the cut appears in the presidential budget.