De vraag is, zou deze Pierre Bourgeois dezelfde zijn als deze in het onderstaande artikel? Merk op: prostitutie, minderjarigen, wapenhandel, Arabische prinsen, geheime diensten, ...
The princes and the call girls
Friday 27 November 1998
[...] A failed fashion photographer, Jean-Pierre Bourgeois, 51, faces six years in jail for enticing, or tricking, 86 young women - some as young as 15 or 16 - into prostitution with the promise of a career in modelling or the movies. Three other people face lesser penalties when the court gives its reserved judgment next month.
Clients are said to have included the actor, Robert De Niro, the former tennis star, Wojtek Fibak, the French film producer, Alain Sarde, the former Emir of Qatar, one of the brothers of King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, and Christian Courtin, the head of Clarins, the large French cosmetics company. The case is not yet over. The other alleged, principal organiser of the conspiracy, Annika Brumark, 50, a one-time Swedish beauty queen, will be tried in May when her lawyer has recovered from a road accident.
Two of the clients of the agency - Fibak and Sarde - are still under investigation and may yet face charges of rape and assault. Brumark, it is alleged, was the real brains behind the network, taking 40 per cent of all the money paid by the clients. Bourgeois, at first, took no money. His reward was to force the glamour-befuddled girls to have sex with him. [...] Instead, she said, she found herself on a yacht - with another girl - performing sexual acts with the Qatari millionaire, William Kazan [...]
Girls would be persuaded to have lurid photographs taken to circulate to film companies and modelling agencies. Instead, the court was told, Bourgeois would send folders of the pictures, on approval, to potential clients. If the girls refused to play along, they were warned that the photos would be sent to their families. [...]One of the other defendants, Nazihabdullatif al Ladki, was a Lebanese businessman and former private secretary to Prince Fawaz of Saudi Arabia, brother of King Fahd.
He admitted dealing with Bourgeois over a period of six years, in which the photographer provided a stream of girls for his employer. "It's something quite natural among Arab princes to want pretty girls," Al Ladki told the court. [...] The six-day trial has been equally disturbing for what it has not revealed. There has been no reference in court to the two, centre-right French politicians, mentioned as regular clients of Bourgeois (but not named) in the report of the investigating magistrate who unravelled the affair.
It has been suggested, in leaks from the magistrate's office, that the Bourgeois-Brumark operation became, briefly, a kind of state-approved broker, providing girls to assist French arms companies to sweeten their deals with Gulf clients. Since this kind of thing was bound to happen, the foreign ministry and security services reasoned, it was better that a "known" and closely watched call-girl service should be used. This reduced the risk of blackmail or "pillow leaks" of secret negotiations.
So why was such an apparently politically protected network prosecuted, when others are not? Paris, like London, has scores of alleged escort agencies. Part of the answer is obvious: the operation run by Bourgeois was a particularly nasty one of its kind. Most of the women provided were not fully consenting professional adults. [...] He was refused permission to pursue his investigation of the links between Bourgeois and a shadowy character called Paul Barril, who once ran the dirty tricks department in the Elysee Palace for Francois Mitterrand, and now runs his own security agency for Gulf clients.