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The French budget minister who kept a secret Swiss bank account also uses the services of a financial expert to handle his own personal wealth, Mediapart can reveal. Jérôme Cahuzac, who has denied ever having such an account despite the fact that he was taped talking about it, has for years entrusted his financial secrets to wealth manager Hervé Dreyfus.

And according to Mediapart's sources it is Dreyfus to whom Cahuzac was talking during that now infamous accidental recording made during 2000 in which the future minister – then a Member of Parliament standing to be mayor at Villeneuve-sur-Lot in the Lot-et-Garonne in southwest France – talks about his account with Swiss bank UBS in Geneva.
“It pisses me off to have an account open there,” says Cahuzac on the recording, before adding in ironic tones: “UBS is not necessarily the most hidden of banks.”


Wealth manager Hervé Dreyfus.© dr
Dreyfus, 59, is a man with a long history in finance and wealth management. He has lent his name to two different companies, each bearing the same name 'Hervé Dreyfus Finance'. The first is a “financial service provider in France and all countries” set up in 1994. When created the enterprise was backed not just by a significant part of Hervé Dreyfus's family but also by an influential Swiss financier Dominique Reyl, who founded Compagnie Financière d’Etudes et de Gestion in Geneva in Geneva. In January 1988 this became Reyl & Cie, which now has subsidiaries in Hong Kong, Singapore and Luxembourg.

The "early dissolution" of HDF was announced at the start of 2011, though the company was not put into liquidation, and the firm's capital was transferred to the other firm created by Hervé Dreyfus, a holding company in charge of managing financial investments, and which was set up in 2000. Since 1994 Hervé Dreyfus has also been one of the directors and partners of the financial groupRaymond James Asset Management International, which is approved by the financial regulatory body the Autorité des marchés financiers. He has a key role as a “private client manager”.

RJAMI's offices are located in a smart building in Paris's 8tharrondissement or district. They are both discreet and well-guarded and it is impossible to get access to the upstairs offices without a dedicated identity badge or being accompanied by a receptionist. Around 15 people work on the 5th floor where amid the fitted carpets and imitation wood walls the atmosphere is one of hushed concentration. As for Hervé Dreyfus himself, he is hard to get hold of. Numerous attempts by Mediapart to contact him, by email and telephone, were unsuccessful.

As for RJAMI, they already appear to be distancing themselves from the affair. “Raymond James AMI is neither a shareholder nor a director in, and nor does it handle any transactions with or on behalf of Hervé Dreyfus Finance. They are two separate companies,” said Isabelle Delattre, chief operating officer at the group.

The Cahuzac family has known Hervé Dreyfus for a long time. At the start of the 1990s this discreet and diligent man worked as a eurobond manager at Crédit commercial de France (CCF), a commercial bank that was later taken over by HSBC. He then managed the financial portfolios of non-resident private clients.

Antoine Cahuzac, the minister’s younger brother, had also been at CCF, between 1989 and 1991, where he was in charge of sales on the trading floor. It was Antoine Cahuzac, who today runs EDF Energies Nouvelles, the renewable energy arm of energy giant EDF, having previously headed up HSBC Private Bank in France, who introduced Hervé Dreyfus to his brother.

Dreyfus and Jérôme Cahuzac developed a solid relationship over the years, based on trust as much as discretion, with the politician apparently dreading any revelation of their ties. Perhaps he had good reason to do so, for among their mutual confidences was an undeclared UBS bank account as revealed by Mediapart on December 4th.


Hervé Dreyfus performed for Jérôme Cahuzac a not dissimilar role to that which wealth manager Patrice de Maistre carried out for L'Oréal heiress Liliane Bettencourt for many years. He manages legal assets, favours particular investments, and is accountable for investment performance. But he also has a more discreet role, knowing details that should on no account be divulged. This explains the extreme discretion of the meetings between the two men. By chance Cahuzac and Dreyfus live just a few yards apart on avenue Pierre Ierde Serbie in Paris's 8th arrondissement.

The minister has not responded to Mediapart's calls regarding his relationship with Dreyfus, nor has Antoine Cahuzac replied to requests for an interview.

A mysterious fortune
Behind the political element of Jérôme Cahuzac's career there is a great deal of money, whether declared or not. Much of his official wealth comes from two cash-making businesses set up at the beginning of the 1990s. One was the clinic that Cahuzac, a surgeon by profession, started up with his wife in 1991. The other was his consultancy practice, Cahuzac Conseil, which was launched in 1993 and which allowed him to develop his links with the pharmaceutical industry.

The clinic prospered by working in a very lucrative niche market - hair transplants. In fact this was a new direction for Cahuzac as at the public hospital network Assistance publique-Hôpitaux de Paris(AP-HP) he had trained as a “general surgeon” with an emphasis on digestive disorders. He had worked there first as a junior doctor (from 1979 to 1983) then as “senior registrar” from 1984.

So why did the surgeon switch to carrying out hair transplants? Jérôme Cahuzac has often explained that he was not able to find a position back at AP-HP after his stint working as a technical adviser on medicines and medical equipment in the ministerial office of Claude Évin who was health minister from 1988 to 1991 under the presidency of socialist François Mitterrand. At the time Cahuzac was labelled a 'Rocardien' – a supporter of Michel Rocardwho was prime minister at the time and who was noted for his greater acceptance of the market economy. Many other socialists were hostile to Rocard's approach and according to Cahuzac's account there were a number of activists at the hospital network who shared this distaste for Rocard and his followers. The surgeon also claims he paid the price for some tough decisions he was associated with while working for the health minister, and which earned the enmity of certain specialists, notably cardiologists and radiologists. There is indeed some truth in Cahuzac's claims.


Jérôme Cahuzac© Reuters
Nonetheless, the surgeon was not entirely blacklisted by Parisian hospitals, for when he left the ministry team in May 1991 he got a three-month contract at the Ambroise Paré hospital, according to information given to Mediapart by the AP-HP. However the work was not that well-paid and unlike, say, a professorship in a teaching hospital, did not provide long holidays.

So with his wife, a dermatologist, Jérôme Cahuzac opted for specialising in treatment to cure or prevent baldness. This involves taking grafts from the back of the neck and transplanting them onto the scalp. Cahuzac had no formal training in this area, though the procedures involved are not the most complicated of surgical techniques.

“The scalp was not in his area of competence at the start,” notes Sébastien Garson, secretary general of the Syndicat National de Chirurgie Plastique Reconstructrice et Esthétique representing surgeons specialising in plastic and reconstructive surgery. “It makes us smile when he is described in the media as a plastic surgeon!”

On December 16th 2003, a year after losing his Parliamentary seat in the June 2002 elections, Jérôme Cahuzac had indeed attempted to think big and sought to acquire the official – and more lucrative - title 'plastic surgeon'. However in 2004 his local branch of the medical professional body the Ordre des médecins turned down his request on the grounds of “insufficient training in the discipline”.

Cahuzac did not give up and appealed against the decision. This time it was the national council of the medical body that gave judgement; on April 27th 2006 it definitively rejected his request. “The private work [of Jérôme Cahuzac] focussing exclusively on hair transplant surgery in Paris since 1990 does not enable us to establish that he has acquired the required knowledge and experience,” wrote the Ordre des médecins. And it added: “If he is a member of the International society of hair restoration surgeryhttp://www.ishrs.org/ it is not cited in files or publications.”

Listed in the Pages jaunes ('yellow pages') telephone directory under the heading 'Doctors: plastic surgery and reconstructive surgery' until 2011, Jérôme Cahuzac's name had disappeared by 2012.

As for the kind of work carried out by the politician's other company, Cahuzac Conseil, that remains less clear, though it appears equally lucrative. It began business just after Cahuzac had been developing close links with certain pharmaceutical companies while at the ministry of health. Just one year after it was set up, in October 1994, Cahuzac bought a luxury flat in rue de Breteuil in Paris for 6.2 million francs (about 945,000 euros).

The following year, in the tax year 1995-1996, the company declared a pre-tax profit of 814,526 francs (124,000 euros) and awarded 400,000 francs (61,000 euros) in dividends. For the year 1998-1999, when Cahuzac had already become a Member of Parliament at the National Assembly and was involved in legislation that related to medicines, the company still managed a profit of 156,081 francs (23,800 euros) thanks to “two bills totalling 250,000 francs (38,000 euros) plus tax”.

Changing versions of the story
Following Mediapart's first revelations about his Swiss bank account the budget minister – who has filed a lawsuit for defamation – first of all denied the existence of an account at UBS in Geneva, before offering diverging versions about certain details in Mediapart's investigation. One concerns the existence of a report written in 2008 by a tax inspector, when the budget minister was UMP politician Eric Woerth, discussing the Swiss bank account. The existence of this report was first denied then admitted.

Another discrepancy came over Mediapart's revelation that Cahuzac made a discreet visit to Geneva at the start of 2010 during which he closed down the Swiss account and moved remaining assets to a more remote tax haven.

Having denied this visit during a meeting with Mediapart in his office on December 4th the minister admitted on RTL radio the following day that it was “probable” that he had gone there, explaining in a somewhat confused manner that he had had to go to Switzerland at that time to meet secret informants over questions of a “tax nature”, without giving more details..


Cahuzac denies having had a Swiss bank account.© Reuters
Jérôme Cahuzac has, on the other hand, never personally denied the telephone conversation that was accidentally recorded at the end of 2000 and which Mediapart has published. The reason is simple; the minister knows it is authentic.

On it Cahuzac can be heard saying: “What bothers me is that I still have an account open with UBS, but there’s nothing more there, no? The only way to close it is to go there?”

He later adds: “It pisses me off to have an account open there. UBS is not necessarily the most hidden of banks.”

With his campaign already underway to become mayor of Villeneuve-sur-Lot – the elections were in March 2001 - Cahuzac was well aware that any outside knowledge of the UBS account would be politically fatal to him. “Above all, it’s not out of the question that I will become mayor in the month of March, so I really don’t want there to be the slightest ambiguity at all […],” he can be heard saying.

During an interview with the newspaper Journal du Dimanche the prime minister Jean-Marc Ayrault re-affirmed his support for the budget minister. “He has formally denied these accusations at the [National] Assembly,” said Ayrault. “I have no reason to doubt his word. Jérôme Cahuzac has filed a lawsuit. I hope that he can defend himself and that this is done as fast as possible.”

So far, the prosecution authorities have opened a formal judicial investigation over the defamation allegation made by the minister against Mediapart. This is simply a formality when a case involves a minister making an allegation against the media. The case will then be passed to the specialist department that handles legal complaints against the media.

However, as yet no judicial investigation has been opened in relation to the minister and his Swiss bank account. In theory there are two ways that such an investigation could occur. One would be at the initiative of the tax authorities, who are currently under the authority of the budget minister... Jérôme Cahuzac. The other is that the public prosecutors office itself opens an investigation into the “money laundering of the proceeds of tax fraud”.

However, a number of legal experts have told Mediapart that the prosecution authorities will not carry out an investigation for tax fraud unless it is instigated by the state authorities following the approval of the tax fraud committee the Commission des infractions fiscales (CIF). This is based at the Ministry of Finance where Cahuzac is budget minister.

No individual or non-government organisation can make a formal complaint alleging tax fraud.This highlights a gap in the judicial framework, doubtless due to the fact that legislators never envisaged that a budget minister might themselves face allegations of tax fraud.

All of which makes a formal judicial investigation into the allegations surrounding Cahuzac and his bank account very unlikely for the moment.

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English version: Michael Streeter