France’s Sarkozy marries Bruni at the Elysee

By Crispian Balmer and Sudip Kar-Gupta

PARIS (Reuters) – French President Nicolas Sarkozy married supermodel-turned-singer Carla Bruni at the Elysee Palace on Saturday, just three months after they started dating.

“Ms Carla Bruni Tedeschi and Mr Nicolas Sarkozy would like to announce that they got married this morning in the presence of their families and in the utmost privacy,” a statement from Sarkozy’s Elysee office said.

The pair tied the knot at a low-key, civil ceremony conducted by the mayor of the Paris district that houses the president’s grandiose official residence.

“I married two voters … who live at 55 Rue du Faubourg St Honore,” Mayor Francois Lebel told Europe 1 radio, giving the official address of the Elysee.

“The bride was wearing white and was ravishing, as usual,” he said, adding: “The bridegroom wasn’t bad either.”

Another official told Reuters the wedding took place at 11.00 a.m. local time (5 a.m. EST).

Sarkozy and Bruni indicated last month that they planned to marry after a whirlwind romance and made clear that it would be a private affair, far from the eyes of the press.

Their relationship has been splashed across the media and Sarkozy’s popularity ratings have plunged in recent weeks, with voters complaining that the president was focusing too much on his private life and not enough on the country’s many problems, including rising prices and flagging consumer confidence.

Now they are wed, Sarkozy might find it easier to manage the relationship because Bruni will become the first lady of France and will start traveling with him on his many overseas trips.

HISTORICAL

Lebel said the wedding took place in a room on the first floor of the Elysee Palace and lasted about 20 minutes.

“There were around 20 people there, close family and a few friends,” he said. The mayor said the last French head of state to marry while in office was Napoleon III in 1853.

Sarkozy, 53, separated from his second wife Cecilia last October following an 11-year marriage and just five months after winning power. His colleagues said he was deeply upset by the divorce.

However, friends say he started seeing 40-year-old Bruni the following month and they were photographed visiting Paris Disneyland together in December. They then spent the Christmas holidays together in Egypt and Jordan.

Photos of the glamorous couple sparked a media backlash against Sarkozy, who was widely described as “president Bling Bling”, obsessed by the rich and famous. One opposition leader dubbed him a modern-age Louis XIV, France’s “Sun King”.

Their quickfire relationship also surprised many in his entourage.

Bruni, 40, has been portrayed as a man-eater in the press and has previously been linked with rock stars Mick Jagger and Eric Clapton, as well as businessman Donald Trump and French former Socialist Prime Minister Laurent Fabius.

While she is a well-known leftist sympathizer, Sarkozy is a right-winger, viewed as a law and order hardliner.

Sarkozy’s own mother urged him not to re-marry after his divorce and Bruni herself has spoken out against marriage. “I’m monogamous from time to time, but I prefer polygamy and polyandry,” she told the Figaro Madame magazine a year ago.

She has a son from a previous relationship, while Sarkozy has two grown-up sons from his first marriage, and a third son from his marriage to Cecilia.

Bruni threw a surprise birthday party for Sarkozy last week at her plush Paris home and friends say the pair are extremely happy together.

RTL radio said Sarkozy’s witness at the wedding was Nicolas Bazire, a senior figure in the LVMH luxury goods group, while Bruni’s witness was Mathilde Agostinelli, head of communications at Prada France.

The radio station also quoted Bernadette Chirac, wife of previous French President Jacques Chirac, as saying getting married at the Elysee, the president’s official residence, was “a wonderful thing”.

“I want to express all my best wishes to this new household. She is very, very beautiful,” she added.

(Editing by Caroline Drees)

Societe Generale apologizes over fraud

By Stephanie Bodoni and Helene Fouquet

Jan. 25 (Bloomberg) — French Prime Minister Francois Fillon chided Bank of France Governor Christian Noyer for failing to inform him sooner that Societe Generale SA had suffered a record trading loss.

“It’s an affair of such an importance for the French financial system, that maybe the government could have been informed earlier,” Fillon told reporters in Luxembourg today.

He said he learned of the 4.9 billion-euro ($7.2 billion) loss on Jan. 23, the day before it was made public and at least three days after Noyer was told by the bank’s chairman.

Fillon’s comments may signal the beginning of official finger-pointing. Fillon ordered Finance Minister Christine Lagarde to complete an investigation in eight days. Noyer was will testify in a Senate hearing Jan. 30 and will be called to appear in the lower house of parliament in the coming weeks, said the head of its Finance Committee, Didier Migaud.

“France is known for being an interventionist state, which it is, and at the same time a country where the prime minister is not informed or aware and is even seemingly the last to know,” Dominique Reynie, a senior researcher at the Institute of Political Studies in Paris said in a telephone interview. “It’s bad for the economy. Confidence will fall while skepticism toward the government will increase,” he said.

`Real Time’

Societe Generale, France’s second-biggest bank by market value, said yesterday that unauthorized bets on stock-index futures by a single trader caused the loss, the largest in banking history. Noyer said he was told during the weekend that began Jan. 19, and was kept informed in “real time.”

“Is it abnormal that the French government was informed four days after this affair was discovered?” Fillon said. “It’s a private bank. It isn’t obliged to do so.”

“All necessary contacts were made in due course,” Noyer said at a briefing yesterday. After informing Noyer, Societe Generale liquidated the positions starting on Jan. 21.

The day that Societe Generale began unwinding the trades linked to European stock-index futures, equity markets in France, Germany and the U.K. fell more than 5 percent. The next day the U.S. Federal Reserve announced a decision to cut interest rates as “financial market conditions continued to deteriorate.”

Fed policy makers didn’t know about the losses at Societe General prior to the rate reduction, a Fed official said yesterday. ECB President Jean-Claude Trichet told LCI television in an interview today that the Bank of France said “what had to be said” within the European system.

Central Banks’ Role

“These things really have to be communicated among European supervisory authorities as soon as possible,” said Karel Lannoo, chief executive officer of the Centre for European Policy Studies in Brussels. “Central banks are at the center.”

Societe Generale and Noyer guarded the information as closely as possible to prevent leaks that could have ruined the bank, said Elie Cohen, a Societe Generale director and economist at France’s National Center for Scientific Research in Paris.

“This was the highest crisis situation,” Cohen said in an interview. “So thinking about calling the Prime Minister? No. Sorry if he gets annoyed. They had to call the bank regulator.”

With positions that surpassed the bank’s market value of about 40 billion euros, “if a hedge fund found out about it, the bank was dead,” he said. “In an ideal world, the government could be informed of such a crisis, but because of today’s world and markets, you just take the best and most efficient measures.”

Societe Generale Chairman Daniel Bouton apologized to shareholders and clients in a letter posted on the company’s Web site today and published in major newspapers, saying the trading loss was “perfectly unacceptable.” The letter insisted the Paris-based company remains solid.

The bank took the right steps in responding to rogue trading, European Union Financial Services Commissioner Charlie McCreevy said today in a Bloomberg Television interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

To contact the reporter on this story: Stephanie Bodoni in Luxembourg at sbodoni@bloomberg.net ; Helene Fouquet in Paris hfouquet1@bloomberg.net