Strauss-Kahn faces pimping charges with hopes of acquittal

Paris.-The former director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) appears this Monday before the Lille Correctional Court, accused like 13 other people of having organized a network of prostitutes for his service, but with many possibilities of being acquitted in view of the evidence .

The trial begins at 2:00 p.m. local time (1:00 p.m. GMT) and one of the first points that the judges will have to examine is the demand of one of the defense lawyers who requests the annulment of the process on the grounds that the investigation was tainted by maneuvers. policies against Strauss-Kahn.

The lawyer Olivier Bluche is based on the recent revelations of Joël Specque, a former commissioner of the judicial police of Lille, who said he had received “information” from high authorities and had carried out investigations since June 2010, when the procedure for this The case was not officially opened until February 2, 2011.

Specifically, there were administrative wiretaps between June 2010 and February 2011 authorized by the conservative government of President Nicolas Sarkozy (2007-2012), which would support the idea that in reality everything was a plot to destroy the ambitions of DSK (the former socialist politician is known by his initials) to win the head of state in the May 2012 elections.

In the words of Karl Vandamme, lawyer for another of those sitting on the bench next to the former Minister of Finance, “pimping (a charge for which everyone is accused) is a legal construction to be able to catch DSK in the network.”

The summary contains evidence of fifteen orgies organized in Belgium, Paris, Washington or New York, using the Carlton Hotel in Lille as their base of operations, between 2007 and 2011 – when DSK was in charge of the IMF -, to which About 100,000 euros were dedicated.

Four of the prostitutes who participated in those sex parties have filed private charges and their testimony at the hearing appears to be the main threat to Strauss-Kahn, who theoretically could be sentenced to up to 10 years in prison and a fine of 1.5 million euros.

In their statements before the instructors, these women described a DSK who was eager for sex and with a very marked tendency towards practices of domination and close to bestiality.

But for a conviction for pimping, proof is first needed that he was an instigator of the orgies, from which he profited, and the line of defense of the former director of the IMF is, first of all, that he was not aware that those His friends brought him prostitutes.

But beyond that, Henri Leclerc, one of his lawyers, emphasized before the “BFM TV” cameras that “even in the hypothesis that Dominique Strauss-Kahn had known that they were prostitutes, there would be no pimping.”