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Strauss-Kahn wants pimp charge dropped

Lawyers for Dominique Strauss-Kahn on Wednesday asked a French appeal court to dismiss charges that the disgraced former IMF chief helped procure prostitutes for sex parties.

Strauss-Kahn wants pimp charge dropped
Photo: Marie-Lan Nguyen

The court in the northern town of Douai deferred a ruling until November 28th after a closed-door hearing, lawyers said.

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 Wednesday's 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 the northern city.

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.

René Kojfer, the former public relations officer at the hotel who has been accused of pimping in the affair, said Wednesday 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 acronym 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" and the "quality of the proceedings."

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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ECONOMY

World unprepared for next financial crisis: ex-IMF chief Strauss-Kahn

The world is less well equipped to manage a major financial crisis today than it was a decade ago, according to Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a former chief of the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

World unprepared for next financial crisis: ex-IMF chief Strauss-Kahn
Former French Economy Minister and former managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) Dominique Strauss-Kahn , poses during a photo session in Paris on Thursday. Photo: JOEL SAGET / AFP
In an interview with AFP, the now-disgraced Strauss-Kahn — who ran the fund at the height of the 2008 financial meltdown — also said rising populism across the world is a direct result of the crisis. 
 
Strauss-Kahn resigned as head of the IMF in 2011 after being accused of attempted rape in New York, although the charges were later dropped. He settled a subsequent civil suit, reportedly with more than $1.5 million.
 
Q: When did you become aware that a big crisis was brewing?
 
A: When I joined the IMF on Nov 1, 2007, it became clear quite quickly that things were not going well. That is why in January 2008, in Davos, I made a statement that made a bit of noise, asking for a global stimulus package worth two percent of each country's GDP. In April 2008, during the IMF's spring meetings, we released the figure of $1,000 billion that banks needed for their recapitalisation.
 
Q: Did the Bush administration grasp the danger of Lehman Brothers going bankrupt?
 
A: No, and that is why Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson decided not to save Lehman, because he wanted to make an example of it in the name of moral hazard. Like everybody else, he considerably underestimated the consequences. Allowing Lehman to go under was a serious mistake. Especially because only a week later they were forced to save the insurer AIG, which was much bigger.
 
Q: Ten years on, are we better equipped to deal with a crisis of such a magnitude?
 
A: No. We have made some progress, particularly in the area of banks' capital adequacy ratios. But that is not nearly enough. Imagine Deutsche Bank suddenly finding itself in difficulty. The eight percent of capital it has at its disposal are not going to be enough to solve the problem. The truth is that we are less well prepared now. Regulations are insufficient.
 
Q: How so?
 
A: After 2012-2013 we stopped talking about the need to regulate the economy, for example concerning the size of banks, or concerning rating agencies. We backtracked, which is why I am pessimistic about our preparedness. We have a non-thinking attitude towards globalisation and that does not yield positive results.
 
Q: Do we still have international coordination?
 
A: Coordination is mostly gone. Nobody plays that role anymore. Not the IMF and not the EU, and the United States president's policies are not helping. As a result, the mechanism that was created at the G20, which was very helpful because it involved emerging countries, has fallen apart. Ten years ago, governments accepted leaving that role to the IMF. I'm not sure it is able to play it today, but the future will tell.
 
Q: Do you believe that Donald Trump's election is a consequence of the crisis?
 
A: I believe so. I'm not saying that there was a single reason for Trump's election, but today's political situation is not unconnected to the crisis we lived through, both in the US with Trump and in Europe.
 
Q: Connected how?
 
A: One of the consequences of the crisis has been completely underestimated, in my opinion: the populism that is appearing everywhere is the direct outcome of the crisis and of the way that it was handled after 2011/2012, by favouring solutions that were going to increase inequalities.
 
Quantitative easing (by which central banks inject liquidity into the banking system) was useful and welcome. But it is a policy that is basically designed to bail out the financial system, and therefore serves the richest people on the planet.
 
When there's a fire, firemen intervene and there is water everywhere. But then you need to mop up, which we didn't do. And because this water flowed into the pockets of some, and not of everyone, there was a surge in inequality.
 
By AFP's Antonio Rodriguez