The French President is spared jail by the French Justice system:
The former president's doctors said he has irreversible neurological problems which cause memory lapses & is spared jail.
Jacques Chirac may have hoped to be remembered as the dapper president and diplomatic heavyweight who retired from the world stage to become the unofficial grandfather of his nation. A man of "flesh and blood and principles … employed in the service of his country," as he put it.
Instead, his place in French history has been seriously tarnished after a Paris court convicted him of embezzling public funds and gave him a two-year suspended prison sentence on corruption charges.
Chirac, 79, who led France between 1995 and 2007, was not in court to hear the ruling. He had been given a special dispensation to be spared appearing at the trial in September and the reading of the verdict on Thursday after a medical report found he had "irreversible" neurological problems that had caused "an important loss of memory".
Anh-Dao Traxel, Jacque Chirac's daughter, speaks outside the court
after he was given a two-year suspended sentence.
Photograph: Bertrand Guay/AFP/Getty Images
Speaking outside the courtroom, Chirac's adopted Vietnamese-born daughter, Anh Dao Traxel, fought back tears as she said: "The justice system has been very severe, but this is a fair and independent justice system. For the family, it's a great pain we have to accept."
His other daughter did not do too well under French Health Care system:
In Ahead of the Curves, the author told of the story he heard of Jacques Chirac and his pact with West African marabouts, witch doctors. He was told to sacrifice one of his daughters if he wanted his presidency. Soon after his younger daughter, began suffering from anorexia nervosa.
So, I Googled Chirac’s daughter:
Telegraph: By Colin Randall
Published: 07 Dec 2004
President Jacques Chirac's wife has broken a 30-year silence to talk publicly about the anorexia that drove their elder daughter to try repeatedly to kill herself.
"A mother who fails with a child, who cannot bring a sick child back to health, always feels guilty," Bernadette Chirac said on French television. "And a father, too."
Laurence Chirac, now 46, was a promising medical student and worked for a short time after her studies with Samu, the emergency medical service, in Paris.
But she had suffered from an acute form of the eating disorder since she was 15, leading to several stays in hospitals and clinics.
Sixteen years ago, during her father's second presidential campaign, she was taken to hospital amid widespread rumours that she had died.
"Being famous can be harmful when one is faced with illness," Mrs Chirac said. "Confronting this kind of difficulty, you just want to hide from the gaze of others."
Laurence, whose younger sister Claude is a key member of the president's team at the Elysée, continued to suffer from the condition. In 1990 she tried to commit suicide by jumping out of the window of her fourth-floor flat.
A nurse assigned to her round-the-clock care was unable to stop Miss Chirac, who survived with a broken pelvis and head injuries.
Little has been heard of her since and Mrs Chirac said merely that she always kept the hope "pinned to my heart" that her daughter would recover.
Mrs Chirac has been the president since 1994 of a charity seeking to create better conditions for children and teenagers in hospital, enabling them to listen to or play music and play sports. She agreed to talk about her daughter on a France 3 discussion programme, “You Cannot Please Everyone”, to help publicise a new clinic for adolescents, La Maison de Solenn, funded by her charity.
"These children need some gaiety in their lives, to be able to see the sun," said Mrs Chirac,
French Health Care as experienced by the President’s daughter.
We did not do too badly with our own Adolescent Psychiatric Units.
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