French PM told to pay up for private jet

Paris: France’s prime minister Manuel Valls faced calls yesterday (Wednesday) to repay the estimated €20,000 (Dh113,700) it cost taxpayers to jet him to Berlin for the Champions League final, after it emerged he took his two sons along for the match.

The Catalonia-born prime minister, who became a French national in his 20s, is a huge fan of the Barcelona team, which won Europe’s most prestigious football competition against Italy’s Juventus 3-1 on Saturday. Valls insisted he had travelled to Berlin for a meeting with Michel Platini, the Uefa president.

However, the weekly newspaper Le Canard Enchaine reported that no such meeting was planned and the only time the pair met was in the stadium when the prime minister introduced Platini to his sons.

“So we learn that two of his children were on the trip to Berlin the least Valls can do is pay it back,” wrote Thierry Mariani, centre-Right opposition MP of the Republicans party in a tweet. Platini waded in yesterday, saying the prime minister had come to watch Barcelona play at his invitation.

“I told Valls that if Barcelona reached the final, I would invite him I kept my word,”

Platini said at a news conference in Paris to mark the first Euro 2016 ticket sales. He insisted they had held a “tete a tete” meeting about Euro 2016 and the corruption scandal engulfing Fifa, football’s world governing body.

Platini, 59, is tipped as a possible candidate to succeed his former mentor Sepp Blatter, who announced last week he would step down as Fifa president.

On Tuesday, Valls said that sport played “a very important role, thanks to the big international events that we are going to host in France”. The role of a prime minister was to “to support these big events for France”, he added by way of explanation.

But his clumsy excuse for taking the trip in a government Falcon jet during a key Socialist Party congress failed to dampen public outrage, with Le Parisien newspaper saying the row had “tainted” his clean-cut image.

A government code of conduct signed by each minister states that “only the expenses directly linked to the exercise of the mandate are covered by the state”. It also says that government officials should “refrain from accepting invitations for private trips” and return to the state all gifts worth more than €150.

President Francois Hollande publicly defended his prime minister, saying he had “matters to discuss” with Uefa. However, the president is reportedly “furious” in private about the negative press over the trip at a time when the ruling Socialists are pushing through austerity reforms.

Some 77 per cent of French people said they were “shocked” by Valls’s use of a government jet to fly to the Champions League final, a poll for BFM TV found.

The Daily Telegraph