Chirac faces inquiry into £30m account

The former French president, Jacques Chirac, will soon be questioned by investigating magistrates on his alleged use of an illegal bank account in Japan.

Although M. Chirac also faces questioning on other alleged financial irregularities, his mysterious Japanese dealings over many years appear to have risen to the top of the pile of his legal worries.

Two judges investigating the Clearstream affair - false allegations of corruption against French public figures, including the present President, Nicolas Sarkozy - will seek to question M. Chirac soon , the newspaper Libération said yesterday.

Judge Jean-Marie d'Huy and Judge Henri Pons, investigating the Clearstream affair, have unearthed new evidence suggesting that M. Chirac had an undeclared account at a Japanese bank in the 1990s. The evidence suggests the account may once have received funds from Gaston Flosse, the former president of French Polynesia who is an old friend and political ally of M. Chirac.

M. Chirac and M. Flosse have denied the allegations, which were leaked to the French press. The former president has always denied having opened a bank account in Japan. M. Flosse, a controversial figure for many years, was found guilty last year of illegally using his political influence to bail out a struggling hotel owned by his son.

Although the claims seem minor in themselves, investigators believe that the Japanese-Polynesian connections may help to explain a web of mysterious financial dealings.

A note from the French external security service, the DGSE, unearthed by the investigators last year, implies that M. Chirac once had ¥7bn (about £30m) in an account opened at Tokyo Sowa bank in 1992. The bank, owned by a since-ruined Japanese businessman, Shoichi Osada, has ceased trading. M. Osada was a friend of M. Chirac for decades.

The investigating judges are reported by the French press to have found new evidence linking M. Chirac to the Japanese bank account in private notes kept by a former intelligence officer, General Philippe Rondot.

General Rondot was one of the - innocent - prime actors in the Clearstream affair. In 2004, he was asked by the former prime minister Dominique de Villepin to investigate fake illegal bank accounts supposedly held by French public figures, including M. Sarkozy, in Luxembourg. The general's entire records have been seized by the judges.

When M. Chirac was president, he was immune from prosecution, even from investigation. Now that he has left the ElyséePalace, he is almost certain to be questioned about his alleged role in illegal party funding in the 1990s when he was mayor of Paris. The alleged Japanese bank account is part of a separate investigation.

M. Chirac is a great Jap-anophile, a fan of sumo wrestling and an expert on Japanese art. He has visited Japan 54 times in the past 37 years, mostly unofficially. His Japanese connections have always been a matter of great sensitivity.

While sharing power with the Socialist prime minister, Lionel Jospin, from 1997-2002, M. Chirac became convinced M. Jospin was using the security services to investigate his dealings in Japan. After M. Jospin left office in 2002, M. Chirac fired the head of the DGSE. The media then learnt that the DGSE had made a brief investigation in Japan, although not at M. Jospin's request. Documents from this inquiry were in General Rondot's files.

Eva Joly, the Norwegian-born former magistrate and a fearless and successful judicial investigator, has called for a separate inquiry into the Japanese affair. Mme Joly, now retired, said it was unclear whether the Clear-stream judges would have the authority to inquire deeply into M. Chirac's Japanese connections.

"It seems essential to me that an investigation should be conducted on the documents which reportedly point to a [Chirac] account in Japan," she said. "A democracy worthy of the name cannot continue in this uncertainty."