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FRENCH BANKS REFUSE TO CLEAR ISRAELI CHECKS

French banks refuse to clear Israeli checks
By Dafna Zucker
Published by Globes, Israel's daily business newspaper (The "Israeli Financial Times")
October 22, 2003

French bank Societe Generale informed the Israeli banks a few days ago that it would cease clearing checks received from Israel. Several other French banks have followed suit with similar announcements, and it is believed among the Israeli banks that all banks in France will join the decision. The move means that Israeli banks cannot clear checks presented by their customers that are drawn on French bank, sources inform "Globes".

As a result, Israeli bank customers, chiefly exporters with customers in France, will have to send their checks for collection, as opposed to the normal practice whereby the Israeli banks operate through a clearing bank.

Sending checks for collection is a lengthy and very costly process.

Bank sources said many Israeli exporters would have to request their customers to pay via bank transfer rather than by check. This is likely to cloud commercial relationships between Israeli and French companies. The sources estimated that some 10,000 checks were on their way to banks in France. These checks will not be able to undergo clearing procedures because of the French banks' decision. Tens of thousands of checks are sent for clearance via French banks every month.

The larger Israeli banks are now considering what to do. Some have already decided not to accept checks drawn on French banks for clearance, but only for collection.

The background to Societe General's decision is a money laundering affair in which eight banks in France were involved, including Leumi France. It is suspected that a large network used checks from Israel sent for clearance in France for money laundering purposes.

As previously reported in "Globes", the examining magistrate investigating the affair has decided to put the banks involved on trial. The French public prosecutor has appealed against the decision.

 

FRANCE TO AIR ITS WORLD VIEW ON NEWS CHANNEL TO RIVAL CNN

France to air its world view on news channel to rival CNN
From Charles Bremner in Paris
London Times
October 1, 2003

French broadcasters were given the go-ahead yesterday to open an international all-news television service to bolster President Chirac's efforts to counter the United States and its English-speaking allies in the battle for world opinion. Scheduled to take to the air next year, the 24-hour channel will cost about £50 million of taxpayers' money a year and be run jointly by France Television, the state network, and TF1, the biggest commercial channel.

The scheme for "une CNN à la française" is the product of an election pledge by M Chirac last year to create a French world service that could rival CNN and the BBC.

The idea was first broached during the Gulf War in 1991 and became urgent after September 11, 2001 and especially this year's war in Iraq, in which the world's view of the conflict was heavily shaped by CNN International, BBC World and the Arab-language channel al-Jazeera.

M Chirac felt that his efforts to cast the French world view as an alternative to the "Anglo-Saxon" model would have been greatly enhanced if a Gallic broadcaster had the attention of the world's hearts and minds – even if it transmitted partly in English. To reach audiences in a world where only 3 per cent of people understand French, free satellite services are planned also in Spanish and Arabic. CII, or Chaîne d'Information Internationale, to use its working title, will fill a vacuum, a parliamentary commission that advised on the scheme said. "Al-Jazeera is proof this monopoly can be broken and that there is a real demand for news that is not Anglo-American."

Jean-Pierre Raffarin, the Prime Minister, said the new channel would promote the 'expression of a French vision, which was necessary now more than ever.

Dominique de Villepin, the Foreign Minister whose flamboyant diplomacy has made him Washington's bête noire, declared this week that the world was thirsting for France. "Never has France been so listened to and never have so many hopes been placed in it," he said. As proof, French officials point to a US opinion poll last week, which found that M Chirac was by far the most popular foreign leader in Iraq – 13 points ahead of President Bush.

Foreign sceptics dismissed the scheme as a grandiose, state-subsidised ploy to promote French official fare, especially as its output will be controlled by the Foreign Ministry. The French are adamant that the channel will be as objective as the Anglo-Saxon services. Presenting a French world view does not mean state propaganda any more than CNN's American-flavoured outlook represents the White House, they say.

CII will initially broadcast to Europe, Africa and Asia, plus the city of New York. French officials were appalled that no "Anglo-Saxon" channel broadcast M Chirac's speech to the United Nations last week. Cover for the rest of the Americas will follow in coming years.

 

FRANCE OFFERS SAUDIS LECLERC TANK AT BELOW COST

France Offers Saudis Leclerc Tank At Below Cost
Middle East Newsline

France has offered its Leclerc tank to Saudi Arabia at below cost as part of a last-ditch effort to save the main battle tank project.

Industry sources said the government in Paris has decided to violate a directive to the state-owned defense industry and offer Riyad 150 Leclercs at $3.4 billion. The sources said the price was below that of the cut-rate Leclerc deal reached with the United Arab Emirates in 1993.

The French offer was discussed by President Jacques Chirac during his meeting with Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah in June at the G-8 summit in Evian, France. So far, Riyad has not accepted the offer.

The Leclerc is manufactured by the state-owned Giat Industries and the negotiations for the tank have been conducted by the official French armaments agency Societe Francaise d'Exportation de Materiels Avances, or SOFRESA.

 

DOUBTS TEARING FRENCH APART

Doubts tearing France apart
The Observer (London)
October 12, 2003

An orgy of breast-beating in print claims the French 'piss off the planet', Paul Webster reports from Paris

At the FNAC Etoile in Paris, more a multi-storey literary warehouse than a bookshop, the shelves are buckling under the weight of ammunition for a political and social war. With titles such as French Arrogance, Falling France and French Disarray, this is heavy-calibre weaponry that is being trained on France's political elite in a war that has broken out over the very soul of the country. Launched against a background of top-level disillusionment with Europe, accelerating unemployment rates, spectacular company failures and a stagnant economy, the books – by some of France's leading social commentators – have added an incendiary factor to popular protests over reforms that could end the 35-hour week, cut social security benefits and introduce across-the-board austerity.

Having recently emerged battered from national education strikes and months of street demonstrations over reduced retirement benefits, Jacques Chirac's administration is looking on with dismay at media encouragement for right-wing intellectual claims that France is now the weak man of Europe, mired in hypocrisy nationally and internationally, indifferent to popular needs such as care of the aged, and shaken by the aftershocks of vain defiance of the US-led war in Iraq. In short, that France is going down the pan.

'Reading these books, France is in agony, powerless and irretrievably condemned to decline,' Dominique de Villepin, the suave but widely mistrusted Foreign Minister, complained over two pages in Le Monde last week, comparing today's prophets of doom to anti-republicans who collaborated with the Nazis.

Equally piqued by France's depiction is the Prime Minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, who sought out America's Time magazine to complain about state-educated French intellectuals 'scrutinising French society while perched on the summit of a pyramid' and obsessed with 'declinism'.

And it is a pretty bleak picture, even by the account of the most rational of the 'declinists', Alain Duhamel, whose lugubrious face haunts every TV channel and serious newspaper column and charges that the country has been struck down by an 'insidious evil'.

'French democracy, the political balance and even the nation's personality are at risk,' he writes in Le Désarroi français.

It is an argument bolstered by Nicolas Baverez, a historian and free-market evangelist and author of La France qui tombe, who in only 134 pages trots out a thousand historical and contemporary statistics to claim that France is paralysed by 'economic, political, social and intellectual immobility and is plunging towards decline'.

Both pale into insignificance alongside L'Arrogance française, where the journalist authors, Romain Gubert and Emmanuel Saint-Martin, state: 'With our sermons, our empty gestures and our poetic flights, we (the French) have pissed off the planet. Worse: we make them laugh.

'It's a sickness to which French people are addicted – believing that France must offer the world Light, Law and Liberty; that their leaders are the carriers of a universal message.'

Arguments on the inevitability of French decline are based on three premises: chaotic history up to the end of decolonisation, the domestic mess caused by lost opportunies and mistaken choices since 1970; and, finally, the months following Chirac's re-election in May 2002 with 82 per cent of the vote which has been followed by some of the worst economic statistics since the war, and an admission by Raffarin that the country is in recession.

Since Agincourt, they say, French rulers have been repeatedly trapped by overconfidence. Napoleon in Moscow in 1812, his nephew at Sedan in 1870, and the Third Republic in 1940.

They point to a national tendency for self-immolation – the Terror, the Paris Commune, and Vichy – before going on to dissect the consequences of reckless decisions by all-powerful Presidents of the Fifth Republic, De Gaulle and Mitterrand among them, a tradition that they claim is pursued by Chirac.

In this they argue that, blinded by their unchallengeable status at home, French Presidents stumble into their own diplomatic and social ambushes constructed with the help of a state-educated elite from the Ecole Nationale d'Administration, ENA.

But none admits his mistakes or apologises for appalling, almost comical, blunders typified by the sinking of the Greenpeace flagship, Rainbow Warrior, by hapless frogmen in 1985.

And it is the suave De Villepin who is mocked with iconoclastic vigour for his vanity in L'Arrogance française, as a cypher for this state-moulded super-class and who is never forced to admit being wrong.

And it is De Villepin who is blamed in particular for persuading a malleable President to take such an uncompromising stand on Iraq although other advisers correctly warned of the long-term damage of taking no account of US hegemony and offending the emerging EU Eastern bloc.

It is not just the elites that come in for criticism; by implication it is the considerable number of ordinary Frenchmen who have put their faith in the rural campaigner, José Bové, a neo-Poujadist.

Much of this wave of populism, say the declinists, is fed by an insistence of both Left and Right on l'exception française, a modern form of chauvinism in which legal fences are built around French language and culture.

It is an 'exception' that is mocked in L'Arrogance française as a hallucinatory drug that spills over into all facets of life from haute cuisine to the heavily subsidised and introverted cinema industry.

It is all pretty apocalyptic stuff. But in one respect the declinists may be right: that their political masters seem somewhat blinkered to the way in which many, from the Murdoch press to the Bush White House, regard La Belle France.

And it is De Villepin who is most exposed in this regard. 'Abroad,' he writes in his answer to declinists: 'France rests a pole of thought and culture, a major economic, military and political power.'