Paris - The Paris public prosecutor demanded Tuesday that former French prime minister Dominique de Villepin be found guilty of helping slur President Nicolas Sarkozy and be handed a suspended sentence of 18 months in prison. In his closing speech, the prosecutor, Jean-Claude Marin, asked that Villepin be found guilty of complicity in libel and also be fined 45,000 euros (67,000 dollars).
Sentences of up to three years in prison and stiff fines were urged for two other defendants in the case, former EADS executive Jean-Louis Gergorin and computer expert Imad Lahoud.
In addition to Sarkozy, the plaintiffs in the case included International Monetary Fund (IMF) head Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Interior Minister Brice Hortefeux and two of his predecessors, and former finance minister Alain Madelin.
Their names were among some 200 on a list of people who supposedly received kickbacks, via secret accounts at the Luxembourg-based clearing house Clearstream, from the 1991 sale of six French frigates to Taiwan.
A five-year investigation found that the list was a forgery and that Sarkozy, Strauss-Kahn and the other politicians did not possess foreign bank accounts into which the kickbacks had supposedly been funnelled.
The prosecution charged that Gergorin was the instigator of the list, which Lahoud put together, and that Villepin did nothing to stop it from being disseminated although he knew it to be false.
A verdict is expected to be handed down in January.
