Prosecutor seeks suspended jail term for ex-French PM

By Thierry Leveque

PARIS (Reuters) - A Paris prosecutor said on Tuesday former French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin was guilty of conspiring to smear Nicolas Sarkozy before his presidential bid, and urged a court to hand him a suspended 18-month prison term.

In his summary after a month-long trial, prosecutor Jean-Claude Marin also demanded a 45,000-euro ($67,380) fine for Villepin, who has denied any wrongdoing and accuses Sarkozy of leading a vendetta against him.

Villepin is accused of trying to have forged documents planted in a judicial corruption investigation with the aim of discrediting Sarkozy as the two manoeuvred to succeed the ageing Jacques Chirac at the 2007 presidential election.

Marin said Villepin, who was foreign minister and then interior minister at the time, had neither instigated nor organised the plot, but was an accomplice by staying silent.

He had "allowed for the manipulation to continue and develop when he had the ability but also the duty to stop it," Marin said.

An eloquent aristocrat who writes poetry in his spare time, Villepin told reporters the prosecutor was wrong.

"Nicolas Sarkozy promised to hang me from a butcher's hook. I see that the promise has been kept," he said, referring to a reported comment from Sarkozy.

Villepin has told the court he was informed of the documents but did not know they were forged.