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LAWYERS FOR DOMINIQUE Strauss-Kahn asked a French appeal court today to dismiss charges that the disgraced former IMF chief helped procure prostitutes for sex parties.
Strauss-Kahn admits attending orgies in France and the United States but claims he did not know the women involved were being paid to take part.
He was not present at the closed-door hearing and his lawyers did not speak to reporters before entering the court in the northern town of Douai.
The case, known as the “Carlton affair” in France, centres around allegations that business leaders and police officials in Lille operated a vice ring supplying girls for sex parties, some of which are said to have taken place at the Carlton Hotel in Douaiy.
Lawyers for Jean-Christophe Lagarde, a police commissioner who faces the same charges as Strauss-Kahn, have also asked for the case against their client to be dismissed.
Rene Kojfer, the former public relations officer at the hotel who has been accused of pimping in the affair, said today that if Strauss-Kahn’s name was not involved there “would be no case.”
“I never took money. I am not a pimp,” Kojfer told Le Parisien newspaper. “What has happened to me and my superiors in the Carlton is unjust. What a great hullabaloo and so little to show for it in the end.
“In my opinion, if there was no DSK, there would be no case,” he said using the acronymn widely used in France for Strauss-Kahn, who was about to enter the French presidential race when he was arrested in May 2011 in New York after a hotel worker alleged he had carried out a brutal sexual assault on her.
The criminal case collapsed because of doubts about the alleged victim’s testimony but Strauss-Kahn was unable to salvage his presidential ambitions as details of another alleged attack and the Carlton case surfaced on his return to France.
Kojfer said his lawyer would be challenging “the manner in which this case was handled”.
Strauss-Kahn’s wife of some two decades, Anne Sinclair, loyally stood by him when the New York scandal erupted but the couple have since split.
A former television journalist and the heiress to a large fortune, Sinclair now runs the French edition of the Huffington Post.
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Not to worry, the Queen and Obama’s visit should kick extra tourism into gear any time now.. Lol
These figures and a decline in exports are the start of a further decline in economic activity.
The next Exchequer returns for the jan mar period will see a reduction in spend thus proving austerity is forcing the economy into a depression.
This allied to a budget taking 3.5 billion
out will lead to a bleak 2011/12
Part of the decrease may have to do with a slowdown in emigration also.
Please tell me you mean immigration Noel? ;)
What? People AREN’T going on holidays in the winter?
And partly the impact of circa 15 flights in and 15 flights out of the Galway Airport that are no more
The useless DAA should sell the old terminal building in Cork airport to Ryanair. Let them make a regional hub out of it like they wanted to do when the new one opened and then we’ll see the numbers rise…at the moment its just sitting there empty…lateral thinking is needed.
The decline in movements doesn’t necessarily correspond to passenger decline.
The Cork decline looks bad, but amounts to 6 movements a day. Then you look at what those movements were.
The Manx2 flight to Belfast, which was canned after the crash, accounted for 4 of them, yet the plane only had a capacity of 19 and usually carried 10-15 people.
Also gone are the Air SouthWest flights to Newquay and Plymouth after the airline ceased operating. Their aircraft would have been the same size that Aer Arann use.
And then there seem to be fewer ski charters.
Passenger numbers are only down by 2%, despite the large fall in flight movements.
These figures refer to number of flights – not necessarily the number of passengers. Airlines may be running less flights with higher passenger loads, or bigger aircraft.
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