Used book – The Cahuzac Affair: In Bulk and in Detail, Fabrice Arfi

Fabrice Arfi, the journalist who broke the story, looks back at the affair that has been making headlines for weeks – with the Mediapart editorial team. The Budget Minister was defrauding the tax authorities! On April 2, 2013, Jérôme Cahuzac appeared before the judge to confess that he had an undeclared Swiss account, which Mediapart had revealed five months earlier, on December 4, 2012. Following his hearing, he was charged with money laundering in connection with tax fraud. “Lies,” “betrayal,” “outrage,” “ignominy”... in the press and even at the Élysée, there were not enough strong words to describe the political earthquake. How could this minister, for five months, deny “in bulk and in detail” being the one who, in a telephone conversation, blurted out: “It pisses me off to have an account open there, UBS is not necessarily the most discreet bank”? How could he, addressing the Assembly before the national representation, calmly affirm: “I do not have, and I have never had an account abroad, neither now nor before”? This book recounts this incredible sequence. Fabrice Arfi looks back at his investigation, his appointments, all the cross-checks and verifications carried out before publishing what he knew would be explosive. Because once the thread is pulled, the ball unravels: then appear the wealth manager Hervé Dreyfus, a lawyer friend of Marine Le Pen, the tax evasion organized for French fortunes by the Swiss establishment Reyl&Cie to Switzerland then Singapore, cash payments at the Cahuzac clinic, the maneuvers of communicators, within the newspapers themselves, to silence the affair and discredit Mediapart. But is this the only account? How much money has passed through it? Millions, as Swiss investigators claim? Are we at the heart of political corruption fueled by pharmaceutical laboratories? This is already all of that, the Cahuzac affair. But it is also much more, as Edwy Plenel, founder of Mediapart, reminds us in this book, because it puts our democratic culture, the principles that inspire it and the values that drive it to the test.