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Apr.28, 2010

When Manuel Noriega was last in Paris, he stayed in one of his three flats and accompanied Felicidad, his wife, as she spent hundreds of thousands of francs on clothes and jewellery in boutiques on the Avenue Montaigne.

Yesterday, Panama’s former dictator was about to spend his first night in a French jail after returning to Paris under police escort.

Extradited from the US, where he had been imprisoned for drug-trafficking, Noriega, 76, was notified formally by a judge that he is to stand trial in Paris on money-laundering charges.

Weak and partially paralysed by a stroke four years ago, he is in court for a bail hearing at which he demanded that he be allowed to go back to Panama after the end of his jail sentence in Florida.

“As a prisoner of war, I have the right to everything the Geneva Convention envisages such as repatriation at the end of captivity,” he said.

French justice turned a deaf ear to Noriega’s pleas and ordered him remanded in custody.

Noriega’s bail application was rejected last night and he was remanded in custody in a wing of La Santé prison in Paris reserved for well-known inmates. Conditions are slightly less harsh in the so-called VIP wing than in other parts of the jail, with prisoners held in individual cells equipped with beds, washbasins and toilets and a 200sq metre (2,000sq ft) courtyard for exercise.

France has been trying to prosecute the Panamanian general for 19 years for allegedly funnelling millions of dollars of drug-trafficking profits through French banks.

French efforts bore fruit on Monday when Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State, approved the extradition request to mark the latest stage in the fall from grace of the career soldier who controlled the South American country in the 1980s.

The case threatens to raise awkward questions for a French Establishment that fêted and supported Noriega for much of his eight years in power.

Despite claims that he was torturing and killing opponents as a matter of policy, he was given the Légion d’Honneur, France’s highest award, in 1987.

He told the French investigating magistrate who questioned him in a jail in Miami in 1995 that he had enjoyed “excellent relations” with France’s highest diplomatic and military authorities, who sold him aircraft and weapons.

Noriega went on to claim that French political leaders had approved his purchase of three exclusive flats in the Rue de l’Université, the Quai de Grenelle and the Quai d’Orsay in Paris in the early 1980s.

Prosecutors say he generated the funds to pay for the flats through deals with Colombia’s infamous Medellin drug cartel. Officials say that a total of €7.6 million (£6.6 million) was placed in French banks, although the money-laundering allegations related to about a third of this amount.

The money also served to pay for the legendary shopping excursions of his wife and of Lorena, Thays and Sandra, his three daughters, who were capable of spending tens of thousands of dollars in a day.

Pineapple Face, as he was nicknamed because of his pockmarked complexion, was sentenced to ten years in prison and a fine of €11.4 million in his absence by a French court in 1999. His wife, whose whereabouts are unknown, received a ten-year sentence and was fined €15 million.

Under French law, defendants found guilty in absentia have an automatic right to a retrial upon their arrest. But the trial could also prove embarrassing for BNP Paribas, CIC and Crédit Lyonnais, the French high street banks at which the Noriegas had their accounts.

His lawyers have argued that if he is to stand trial, his bankers should be in the dock for aiding and abetting his money-laundering activities.

They also claim that he should be treated as a prisoner of war, as he was in the US, where he had a television, telephone and exercise equipment in a two-room cell. They will go on to claim that he should be granted immunity from prosecution because he was effectively head of state at the time of his alleged crimes.

Like France, the US also saw Noriega as an ally for much of his time in power, offering him protection and using him as a CIA informant during the Cold War. But George Bush Sr finally lost patience with his erratic behaviour and links to drug dealers in 1989, when he ordered 24,000 troops to intervene in Panama.

Noriega took refuge in the Vatican’s Embassy in Panama City but surrendered in January 1990 after the US engaged in psychological warfare that involved blasting the building with ear-splitting rock music 24 hours a day.

Panama’s deposed dictator was taken to the US, where he was given a 40-year jail sentence for drug trafficking offences in Florida — a term subsequently reduced to 17 years for good behaviour. He finished his sentence in 2007, and had been fighting his extradition to France.

His lawyers sought instead to secure his return to Panama even though he was given a 54-year sentence there for killing and kidnapping opponents during a 20 career in the military. But in January, the US Supreme Court refused to hear his appeal against extradition, paving the way for a trial in Paris.