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.

It's official, Paris Roissy-Charles de Gaulle airport is the world's worst

To anyone who regularly (or even infrequently) has the displeasure of passing through Roissy-Charles de Gaulle, France's major airport, the findings by the independent Canadian-based website sleepingairports.net that it ranks as the worst in the world will come as no surprise.

Back in April this year even this mild-mannered Brit was forced to bash away at the keyboard to share with others some of the horrors offered up by what has to be the biggest mess and work in progress, Terminal E (read more about that here).




But according to the website the problems experienced by passengers at CDG aren't just limited to one terminal.

The site asked its readers to rate airports on what it calls the "four Cs"; comfort, conveniences, cleanliness and customer service. And Roissy failed to deliver the goods on all counts.

All right so it might not be the most scientific poll ever taken, but the results, albeit only for the first six months of this year, and the comments, aren't far off the mark, as anyone regularly faced with the prospect of passing through CDG will know.

Filthy, noisy, unwelcoming and full of outright rude and unhelpful staff were just some of the comments made as Roissy beat out Moscow's Sheremetyevo, New York's JFK, Las Angeles' LAX and Delhi airport in India for the least coveted title of the world's worst.

The findings haven't gone unnoticed here in France, although the perhaps Aéroports de Paris (ADP), the authority that owns and manages both Roissy-CDG and the capital's other major airport, Orly, might wish that they had.

But at least they had one defender (of sorts) in the form of Jacques Attali who, among many other hats he has worn, was an advisor to the former French president, François Mitterrand.

Even he had some difficulty though in downplaying the arguments and comments of what is after all an independent website and whose contributors hadn't exactly been coerced into making their remarks.

He argues that although the reputation is without doubt unjust as there are plenty of ADP staff at both Roissy and Orly who "do their best to welcome, help and make the experience of passing through the airport a pleasurable one" there is also some substance to the findings.

He imagines arriving in France for the first time and seeing rather "hideous and vague signs, reminiscent of East Berlin".

"No human being there with whom to interact and no welcome," he writes.

"And it's worse for those arriving early in the morning when there are in general just a couple of police at passport control doing their best to deal with thousands of passengers arriving from North America and Asia."

Ah yes, Monsieur Attali, ADP and sleepingairports.net, there's many a horror tale this (and I'm sure other) user(s) of Roissy-CDG could tell.

Perhaps some will comment here and recount their stories or even (now this really would be a surprise) others will come to the airport's defence.




One thing's for sure, Roissy-CDG is a far, far cry from Singapore's Changi airport, which has consistently received rave reviews, regularly rates as the world's best, and charmed this traveller when he passed through for the first time earlier this year.

A holiday in its own right.

The tale of the family that never went missing

The mystery of a mother and her two children who "disappeared" last week has been solved.

They have turned up in the south of France where they had apparently been on holiday "taking a break" from the rest of the world.

The 45-year-old mother and her two children, aged, 14 and 15, were first reported missing last weekend.

They had been on holiday in the mountains in a village near le Grand-Bornand in the Haute-Savoie in southeastern France.

The alert was first raised by the estranged husband and father of the two teenagers on Saturday, reportedly concerned that he had heard nothing from his family.

When police went to investigate the apartment in which the three of them had been staying, they found it empty and the car missing.

An official inquiry was launched and the story quickly became the focus of media attention with speculation throwing up possibilities of a suicide, an accident or an attempt by the mother to flee the country with the children: speculation perhaps fuelled to a large extent by the authorities saying that no line of inquiry had been ruled out and that the mother "was known to be someone with depressive tendencies."

And so the story quickly gathered momentum of its own, with no sign of life and no clue as to their whereabouts.

Until Monday that is, when an employee at a camping site over 100 kilometres away in the south of France confirmed having seen the three "missing" family members, and records of cash withdrawals in the area surfaced.

On Thursday came the official confirmation that the investigation had been closed and an interview with the mother on national radio where she gave her version of events and expressed her astonishment at how much had seemingly been made of so little.

The 45-year-old said she was surprised that she and her two teenage children had been at the centre of a nationwide search as all they had been trying to do was to take a break "without listening to the news and without being able to be contacted".

"We weren't aware of anything and one day in the car I thought that perhaps we should listen to the news on the radio as it had been quite a while since we had tuned in," she said.

"I was very surprised that there was a report on me and I was a little bewildered. I immediately called my brother."

Her main concern, she insisted, had been to give her children a proper break and she didn't really understand why her family, and in particular her estranged husband, had overreacted.

"I was a little fed up having to ask him constantly to get in touch with his two children, and so I just decided to cut ourselves off from anyone being able to get in touch," she said.

"They (the children) wanted to see the sea and I wanted him to make an effort to try to get in touch with them, but I never wanted the whole thing to take on the proportions it has."

So a happy ending to a story, which in the words of the national daily, Le Figaro, in reality turned out to be "Much ado about nothing"...and perhaps a reminder to us all not to jump to conclusions until the story has been told.