Sarkozy splurges थà¥10,000 a day on food, owns 121 cars: Book
LONDON: French president Nicolas Sarkozy spends £10,000 a day on food and keeps 121 cars at his Elysee Palace, a new book says.
In the book titled L'argent de l'Etat (Money from the State), socialist MP Rene Dosiere describes what he sees as extraordinary excesses by the French president and accuses Sarkozy of "ignoring the most elementary principles of separation between private and public accounts" , the Daily Mail reported.
Sarkozy has cancelled the annual £500,000 palace garden party, but this doesn't go far enough, according to Dosiere.
Just last week, he sent a medical team to Ukraine on board a state-owned private jet to attend to one of his sons, Pierre, and fly him back to Paris at the expense of £22,000. His fleet of cars is double the size of predecessor Jacques Chirac's and cost, annually, £100,000 to insure and a whopping £275,000 to fuel. Then there are his huge travel costs. Dosiere claims Sarkozy uses an Airbus A330 - dubbed Air Sarko One - that drained the public purse of £215 million to kit out.
Recent excursions include a trip to Saint-Quentin , from Paris, that cost £350,000, a £109,000 sortie to the Lascaux caves with Bruni and a twoand-a-half-hour trip to Ain that cost £700 a minute, says Dosiere. Further, he wrote that Sarkozy never seems to linger anywhere to meet locals and absorb their culture. His total annual expenditure comes to £95 million.
