French minister in flat scandal

By Caroline Wyatt
BBC News, Paris

The flat is just off the Champs Elysees in the centre of Paris

The recently appointed French finance minister has had to move out of a state-paid luxury flat to try to end an embarrassing row over its huge cost.

It comes when the ministry is ordering government spending cuts to ensure France brings down its budget deficit.

Herve Gaymard, his wife Clara and eight children were living in a luxury Paris flat at a cost to the taxpayer of 14,000 euros (£9,000) a month.

Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin had stepped in to issue new guidelines.

He limited the size of flats that ministers can use at the state's expense.

Mr Gaymard insisted he had done nothing wrong, but said that for his family's peace of mind they would be leaving their 600 sq m (6,500 sq ft) luxury state flat straight away for more modest accommodation.

Backlash fear

The size and cost of his ministerial residence came to light in a satirical weekly magazine and proved an immediate embarrassment to the government as a whole and Mr Gaymard in particular.

Herve Gaymard is trying to get France to cut back on public spending

He is in charge of a ministry which has been telling the French to tighten their belts - only this week, he said France must cleanse itself of high public spending.

So when it emerged that the finance minister's flat cost taxpayers as much again as his monthly salary, the French prime minister felt compelled to act, setting out a rather humbler size limit for ministerial homes.

The revelations could not have come at a worse time for France's conservative government, which faces a series of strikes over its unpopular economic reforms.

It also fears a backlash when the French vote on the European Union constitution in a referendum later this spring.

The affair is a reminder, too, of the scandals of the previous conservative government, when the former prime minister Alain Juppe was forced to abandon his fashionable five-bedroom flat when it emerged that he and his son, in an adjacent flat, were paying a mere fraction of the market rent.