French court delays decision on Lagarde inquiry

Chapter 1. A wealthy entrepreneur in a large, resource-rich country sees an expensive toy and sets his heart on it. With close ties to the regime and a seat in the dusty lower chamber of the assembly, he swings a loan from the public coffers. A little later he becomes minister for such-and-such, but his toy turns out to be high maintenance. As it threatens to eat into his personal fortune, the big man harrumphs and leans on the state agency that lent him the money in the first place to buy it off him.
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Chapter 2. The agency, which now has a controlling interest in the toy, sells it on for roughly twice as much as the big man owes.
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Chapter 3. The large sum fetched by the asset rankles the big man and for several years he tries to claw back money from the agency that sold it off. Draped and distinguished lawyers are engaged at great expense, ministers are petitioned and then, 15 years on, the government of the resource-rich country interrupts the judicial process by ruling in the big man’s favour: the procedure is described as ‘arbitration’. He receives hundreds of millions in local currency by way of a settlement and another 40 million in damages. The money is paid out by the state.
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Tapie felt some of those proceeds belonged to him and went to the courts. And because Crédit Lyonnais was majority state-owned at the time of the sale, this was a tussle for public money. The arguments dragged on until 2008, when Sarkozy’s people forced a settlement in his favour. Crédit Lyonnais had by then been privatised and Tapie was no longer a ‘socialist’, but a Sarkozy supporter. The official who pushed the settlement – in euros, by the way – was Christine Lagarde, Sarkozy’s finance minister. Last week she was appointed head of the IMF, after her predecessor, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, lost his marbles on the floor of a Sofitel bedroom.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2011/07/04/jeremy-harding/punish-and-constrain-or-not