Hortefeux to take legal action over two Citroën C6 car claim

Yes it's still summer and government ministers here in France are due back at work this week, but that hasn't stopped silly stories making the headlines.

This time around it's the ongoing saga of the interior minister, Brice Hortefeux, and the report by the weekly car magazine, Auto Plus, back in July that when he first took over his new job the month before, one of Hortefeux's first acts was to order two spanking brand new luxury Citroën C6 cars.

You might remember the magazine revealing that cost of the two vehicles was a cool €100,000 (read story here) - hardly the best example of political budgeting in a time of financial restraint.

A spokesman for the ministry issued a formal denial, but the author of the report and the magazine's deputy editor-in-chief (one and the same), Pierre-Olivier Savreux, stuck to his guns issuing a challenge which to all intents and purposes amounted to his saying, "Prove that the story isn't true".

Well, if the reports carried in the French media this week turn out to be true, then Savreux could in a roundabout way have his wish granted.

The national daily Le Figaro is reporting that Hortefeux is prepared to go to court to defend his name. That's right, the interior minister is apparently preparing legal action declaring that the magazine's report "propagated false information".

Now Hortefeux might well be best buddies and a longtime political ally of the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, but does he really need to emulate his boss by resorting to the courts?

Apparently so although it's unlikely that he'll get anywhere near approaching the lengths to which Sarkozy has taken since coming to office.

You might remember that Sarkozy spent quite a chunk of time in court during his first 18 months of office.

All right maybe he didn't actually pitch up himself, he had a lawyer to do that, but all the same he managed to resort to French justice to pursue civil suits more than any other president in the history of this country's Fifth Republic - six in total.

The infamous case of the voodoo doll seemed never-ending while others, for example the alleged text messages to his former wife, were dropped before they reached the courts.

Maybe Hortefeux, who'll surely have better things to do with his time in the upcoming months, has nonetheless decided to take a leaf out of the president's book.

Or perhaps he'll let the matter drop once the only new car ordered (by his predecessor in the job, Michèle Alliot-Marie, according to a ministry spokesman back in July) makes its apparition at the end of the year as scheduled and the other one fails to materialise.

Presumably that'll all the "proof" necessary for Auto Plus to retract its original story and print an apology.

Watch this space.