Strauss-Kahn loses bid to end sex offence inquiry

A FRENCH court has rejected a request by former International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn to drop a sex offence inquiry in which he risks standing trial on pimping charges, his lawyers said.

The ruling was given yesterday, just over a week after Strauss-Kahn settled a separate civil case in New York with a hotel maid who accused him of attempted rape in May 2011, ending his French presidential hopes and career at the IMF.

While the New York settlement brought his US legal woes to an end, the latest decision by the court in Douai in northern France means he remains under the legal spotlight at home.

“Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s defence team is certain that he will ultimately be cleared of these absurd accusations of pimping,” lawyer Henri Leclerc said in a statement, adding that he planned to appeal to France’s supreme court. Strauss-Kahn denies wrongdoing in all the charges against him.

He is under fire about sex parties with prostitutes in the so-called Carlton Affair, named after a hotel in northern France at the centre of the inquiry.

His lawyers argue that consorting with prostitutes is not illegal and that investigators have no grounds for pursuing him on the basis that his behaviour could be construed as pimping, which is illegal.