French mayor charged over suspected sex tape bribery of rival

A mayor of a city in southeast France has been charged for allegedly trying to bribe a political rival by using a video of him being massaged by a male escort in a Paris hotel.

Gael Perdriau, a 50-year-old conservative who runs Saint-Etienne, is suspected of using the secret recording to manipulate his centrist rival and one-time deputy, Gilles Artigues, over a period of eight years.

After spending nearly two days in police custody, he was charged late on Thursday evening with bribery, a statement from the local prosecutor's office said.

"A decisive stage has passed which demonstrates that Gilles Artigues has been a victim of organised bribery, which is what he said from the beginning," Artigues' lawyer Andre Buffard told AFP.

"We can't pre-judge who ordered it, but there are serious and corroborated indications pointing to the mayor of Saint-Etienne," he added.

The scandal in the former mining town, which is home to around 400,000 people, erupted in August last year when a whistle-blower told investigative news organisation Mediapart about the existence of the video.

The footage of Artigues, a married father of four and practising Catholic known for his conservative views, was filmed in 2015 allegedly on a hidden GoPro camera which belonged to the council.

In an apparent recording of a conversation in the mayor's office in 2017 published by Mediapart, Perdriau can be heard threatening Artigues over the video while his chief of staff Pierre Gauttieri says "your children will never recover."

Gauttieri was also charged on Thursday, along with another deputy mayor and ally of Perdriau, Samy Kefi-Jerome.

Whistle-blower Gilles Rossary-Lenglet, who admitted to taking part in the plot to Mediapart, was charged with complicity in bribery, which was condemned by his lawyer.

Perdriau has been expelled from the right-wing Republicans party to which he belonged, but has refused to step down as mayor and continues to protest his innocence.

"I am not the instigator, the organiser or a user of this video," he told AFP in December. "I have never had or seen this document."

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© Agence France-Presse