Former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn, leaving a polling station Sunday, faced new claims of ties to a call-girl …
How are things going for former International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn since his return to France?
Not so well. Days after French prosecutors closed the second rape investigation the former IMF chief has faced this year, DSK is now the subject of new allegations linking him to an underage prostitution ring being investigated in Lille, northern France.
"Investigators in Lille believe they have uncovered a well-connected ring that brought women over the border from Belgium to have sex with wealthy clients in hotels in the city," France's Radio France International reported Monday. "Some of the women are believed to have been under-age."
Strauss-Kahn on Sunday asked to be interviewed "as quickly as possible" to clear his name amid what he called malicious and dangerous insinuations in the new case, RFI wrote.
According to France's weekly Journal du Dimanche newspaper, "investigators believe the ring may have dispatched call girls to the U.S. to entertain [DSK] and he might have taken part in sex parties organised in Paris by one of the Lille suspects," RFI wrote.
A senior French police commissioner "who hoped to guard Dominique Strauss-Kahn if he became President of France organised an orgy with him in a Paris hotel," the UK's Daily Mail reported, based on the Journal du Dimanche's investigation. "The senior officer"--identified as Jean-Christophe Lagarde--"is also said to have accompanied prostitutes to New York to meet up with Mr Strauss-Kahn when he was in charge of the International Monetary Fund."
Five men have already been jailed as a result of the inquiry into the illegal prostitution ring, including the director and PR chief of one of the hotels.
According to the Journal du Dimanche investigation, one prostitute has told investigators that DSK and French police official Lagarade "organised an orgy in the spring of 2010 'in a duplex suite of a luxury central Paris hotel,' " the Daily Mail wrote.
"According to the JDD, the illegal prostitute racket not only provided girls for luxury French hotels like the Carlton in Lille, but also ones in the U.S.," the Daily Mail wrote.
Prostitutes were allegedly selected for DSK by "Dominique Alderweireld, a 62-year-old 'pimp' nicknamed 'Dodo', who made a number of trips to see Mr. Strauss-Kahn in New York," the Daily Mail wrote. "Dodo" Alderweireld "has since been arrested."
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