PARIS (AFP) — The French Socialist opposition on Monday called for a commission of inquiry to shed light on the government's role in an insider trading scandal at Airbus parent company EADS.
The commission would determine whether the government knew of problems at Airbus when a state-owned bank purchased EADS shares from the Lagardere group, said Socialist Party spokesman Bruno Le Roux.
Several top executives and corporate shareholders Lagardere and Germany's DaimlerChrysler are suspected of illegally selling millions of euros in shares before serious delays in the Airbus superjumbo A380 jet were announced.
Lagardere, whose chief executive Bruno Lagardere is a close friend of President Nicolas Sarkozy, sold shares in April 2006. The setbacks at Airbus were publicly disclosed in mid-June 2006, causing a plunge in the EADS share price.
Le Roux said the decision by the state-owned Caisse des depots et consignations (CDC) to purchase Lagardere's shares "appears to be an affair of state."
"We demand the fullest transparency and a timetable of the information that was provided to the various ministers" between November 2005 and April 2006, when the illegal trading allegedly took place, said the party spokesman.
The parliamentary inquiry should determine "whether the state knew and if it did, why did it not stop the sale of Lagardere shares and warn the Caisse de depots of the bad transaction that it was about to make," said Le Roux.
Airbus chief executive Thomas Enders, among those allegedly accused of insider trading in a report by the French stock market authority AMF, said in an interview Monday he felt he had been "treated like a criminal and stigmatised" by the allegations.
Enders sold 50,000 stock options in EADS for a pre-tax profit of more than 700,000 euros (990,000 dollars) in November 2005, at around the time that problems were appearing with the flagship A380 superjumbo jet, the German news weekly Focus reported.
Enders, who was co-chief executive of EADS at the time, told Focus the options were an integral part of his remuneration and "not a speculative object."
The magazine quoted him as insisting he "did nothing wrong and thus has a clear conscience."
The insider trading scandal at EADS erupted as Airbus was set to deliver to Singapore Airlines its first superjumbo A380 on October 15 during a ceremony seen as turning the page on the plane maker's woes.
Le Monde newspaper at the weekend quoted minutes from a supervisory board meeting of the CDC on July 12, 2006 that appeared to show that former finance minister Thierry Breton knew about the transaction with Lagardere and gave it the green light.
The report contradicted testimony that Breton gave to a Senate committee hearing last week during which he asserted that the "state was beyond reproach" in the affair and that he was not notified of the deal with Lagardere.
Francois Chereque, head of France's second-biggest union the CFDT, charged late Sunday that Breton could not have been unaware of such a major transaction at a group in which the state is the main shareholder.
"Either he is lying or he is incompetent," he said.
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