Jean-Jacques Augier is an influential publisher who studied with François Hollande at the ENA management school. Photograph: Frederic Souloy/Gamma/Getty Images
François Hollande faces more embarrassment after it emerged that a close friend and treasurer for his presidential election campaign invested in offshore businesses in the Cayman Islands.
Jean-Jacques Augier, a publisher who studied with the Socialist president at the elite ENA management school, featured in records leaked from Britain's offshore financial industry, unearthed in a project by the Washington-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists(ICIJ) in collaboration with the Guardian and other international media, including Le Monde.
Augier, 59, who once worked as an inspector of finances in France, confirmed the investments and said nothing was illegal. But the revelation comes at a bad time for Hollande, whose government is in crisis following the shock admission by Jerome Cahuzac, the former budget minister and tax tsar, that he had hidden €600,000 in a secret account and repeatedly lied about it.
Hollande was elected on promises to crack down on those who move their money abroad, toughen rules on tax havens, make the world of finance more transparent and ensure the wealthy contribute a larger share to restoring the crisis-hit French economy.
Augier launched a Caymans-based distributor in China in 2005, with a 25% shareholding granted to a British Virgin Islands company. He said his partner in the offshore firm International Bookstores Ltd was Xi Shu, a Chinese businessman.
Augier told Le Monde he did not have "either a personal bank account in the Caymans or any personal direct investment in that territory". He said he invested in the company through a holding that runs all his Chinese business interests. "The investment in International Bookstores appears in company records. Nothing is illegal."
Augier is an influential book and magazine publisher who recently acquired France's leading gay magazine, Têtu. His business mentor was Andre Rousselet, a close friend of François Mitterrand, who appointed him to run the well-known French taxi firm Taxi G7 where he made his fortune.
Asked about a second offshore Caymans entity, set up in 2008-09 and then moved to Hong Kong during the financial crisis just as the G20 was declaring war on tax havens, Augier did not give details. "Perhaps I lacked prudence," he told Le Monde.
He said his operations were all legal and declared. Le Monde questioned whether, even if the operations were legal, an inspector of finances "who carries the values of the republic" should take part in operations that supported the financial opacity of offshore territories.
Another French daily, Le Figaro, called it "at least an enormous political faux-pas".