Chirac at last!
 

Hallelujah!
Former French president Jacques Chirac has been given a 2 year-prison sentence (both suspended) for mistaking Paris' City Hall money for his party's.
That was a loooong time ago.
He ran for presidency in 2002 to prevent judges from nosing around him.
Hallelujah!
He'll not go to jail, fond hearts, he'll stay by the Seine, in a big house lent to him by some rich foreign prince.

He won't object to the sentence. That's great.
He's had a lucky life, dodging all that flew back to him for so long (he had a bunch of hoodlums for political friends, that man).

The prime minister said that justice had prevailed, and quickly added that it was a bit sad though, to see how slow it had been, and you could sense that he felt that justice could have shut its mouth, as his party had done so much (for the country) to keep it silent since... 1997?

A great day.

He didn't order the army to murder the people, mind, yet it's good to see the powerful, when guilty, being treated the way they should.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HWcxAcOpVY

I could cry.

i would really like to see him get some actual prison time instead of a suspended sentence. it seems so rarely that politicians get what they deserve.

I don't get this.

Well, he's been portrayed as a man who would hardly spend a penny.
Houses :

When he was younger, he bought a castle (that is he and his wife, whose folks were rich). The castle was a bargain, as its owner had tried in vain to raise money from the government agencies to restore its beauty. But the file never got any avail, so he sold it. Chirac bought it, asked for a governmental grant to start construction on the damaged wings... and was promptly rewarded with that help.
That must have been in the late 1960s.

Now, the house by the Seine.
When his presidency ended, he had to find a new home.
He apparently had none, the castle being out of question (they still own it I believe, as they tried to prevent the building of a camp for juvenile delinquents in its vicinities; and his fellows on the right wing are in favor of the construction of jails and the sort; but not in his backyard).
Before being president, he had been the mayor of Paris, and had been lodged by the town til he became president (from the mid-70s to 1995).
When president, he lived at the Elysée Palace, in front of the congress (1995-2007).
So when all of this was over, a rich friend of his, who had a spare apartment by the Seine tossed him the keys so he could remain in Paris.

"A man so corrupt he would gladly pay for the pleasure of selling himself"