While President François Hollande is reeling from revelations that his tax-enforcement minister (no less) hid fortunes of money in off-shore bank accounts, the scandal has brought a sense of satisfaction in at least one corner of Paris: The offices of a small, five-year-old news site called Mediapart. Beginning last December, Mediapart's reporters had published articles about the tall, dapper minister, Jérôme Cahuzac, saying that he had evaded taxes on his considerable earnings from years as a plastic surgeon. The explosive details emerged just as Hollande was vowing to crack down on tax cheats—the portfolio assigned to Cahuzac—and fuming against actor Gerard Depardieu for leaving high-tax France. Cahuzac fiercely denied Mediapart's allegations, including to Hollande. In a speech that has come back to haunt him, the budget minister also told the French parliament he had "not now, not ever" hidden funds abroad. Shortly after, Mediapart posted an audiotape conversation from 2000, in which Cahuzac can be heard worrying that his Swiss bank account might be revealed. Last month he resigned his minister's job on Hollande's orders and on Tuesday—thanks to Mediapart—he was forced to admit that he still had about €600,000 stashed in Swiss and Singapore accounts. (MORE: Swiss bank account scandal claims Hollande's budget minister.) As bad as the scandal has been for French leaders, so it has been spectacularly good for Mediapart—for which it is just the most recent scoop. The small, feisty site has beaten the odds by breaking some of the biggest scandals of the decade in France, on a shoestring budget and against widespread skepticism from the much richer French newspapers. In its five-year existence, the site has published details of alleged campaign-finance abuse by Nicolas Sarkozy, for which the former president is now under formal investigation by police. Mediapart also broke the news of Sarkozy's links to a Karachi arms deal; the intervention of IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde in the legal settlement of a French businessman Bernard Tapie; and documents suggesting that Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi might have sought to finance Sarkozy's 2007 presidential(http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=world.time.com&blog=19871253&post=79989&subd=timeglobalspin&ref=&feed=1)
Via: TIME GlobalSpin