Carla Bruni-Sarkozy

Paris, Jan. 8: After almost disappearing from public view over the past year to have a child, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, the singer wife of the French President, is back under the spotlight amid embarrassing accusations that she used her influence with a global charity to funnel funds to a musician friend in Paris.

According to a French magazine, Bruni-Sarkozy, 44, persuaded the Global Fund, a wealthy medical charity for which she acts as an “ambassador”, to award $3.5 million to the friend so that he could develop a campaign to fight AIDS. The scandal is an embarrassment to the President.

The grant was said to have been issued by the multi-billion-dollar fund without a public tender and allegedly in violation of the rules. The Geneva-based fund, which was set up a decade ago to fight Aids, tuberculosis and malaria, dismissed the allegations as “groundless” and said no rules had been broken.

Nevertheless, the position of Michel Kazatchkine, the French doctor friend of Bruni-Sarkozy who directs the fund, is said to be under threat with calls for his resignation from the charity’s board.

Bruni-Sarkozy, who made her name as a model before becoming a folk singer and the third wife of Sarkozy, has denied doing anything wrong. She is often criticised for trying to influence her husband but this is the first time she has been accused of impropriety in the international charity world.

Sarkozy’s office declined to comment on the story in Marianne magazine. But among the President’s entourage, the allegations are said to be seen as part of a scheme to discredit him just as he is preparing to launch his re-election campaign.

Bruni-Sarkozy was said to have lobbied the Global Fund and Kazatchkine for money on behalf of Julien Civange. He is a former rock musician who works closely with her as an adviser to her own AIDS-fighting charity, a foundation she set up in 2009 in memory of her brother who died of the disease.

Civange is one of several young men from the creative world to have gravitated towards the Elysee since Bruni-Sarkozy moved in. He set up his first rock band with two school friends when he was 16 but has had a mixed career, becoming what Marianne called “a sort of failed Jean Michel Jarre”, a reference to the electronic musician and composer of Oxygene. He was one of the witnesses at the Sarkozy-Bruni marriage in 2008.

When Civange came up with a concept for using entertainment to publicise the fight against AIDS, the magazine claims Bruni-Sarkozy immediately gave him her support and approached the Global Fund.

His “Born HIV Free” campaign was abandoned late last year, though, when word of a possible breach of the funding rules began to circulate.

Kazatchkine, known as “Kaza” to his friends, was quoted in Marianne as saying that Bruni-Sarkozy had “personally told him she had total confidence in Julien Civange to whom she had delegated the AIDS dossier”.