Lagarde: Global star threatened by French court case

PARIS: Christine Lagarde smashed the glass ceiling at one of the world’s preeminent institutions when she was named three years ago to lead the International Monetary Fund, capping a shooting-star career.
She then led the IMF’s tentatively successful efforts to halt the implosion of the euro zone and helped the Fund get past the embarrassing sex scandal left by her predecessor Dominique Strauss-Kahn.
But one key event when she was French finance minister in 2007-2008 — a huge state payout to controversial tycoon Bernard Tapie — threatens to mar that record and possibly cut short her career on the global stage.
After four rounds of gruelling questioning, a French court this week charged her with “negligence” over the multi-million graft case.
She said she had been placed “under formal investigation.”
In France, being placed under formal investigation is the nearest equivalent to being charged, and happens when an examining magistrate has decided there is a case to be answered.
It does not, however, always lead to a trial and she stressed she was not stepping down as head of the IMF.
A steady career climb to the top of global finance has long made the deep-tanned, silver-haired Lagarde a French stand-out.
Now 58, she was born in Paris to academic parents and brought up in the port city of Le Havre.
As a teenager she was a synchronized swimming champion and learned to speak nearly flawless English.
After earning a law degree, she skipped a French establishment career and instead joined the Paris office of prestigious US legal consulting giant Baker and McKenzie.
Over 18 years she pushed her way up to become chairwoman of the company’s global executive committee in 1999, a first for the firm, and then of its global strategy committee in 2004.
She then embraced politics, joining the government of president Jacques Chirac as trade minister in June 2005.
Two years later Chirac’s successor Nicolas Sarkozy named her agriculture minister, and shortly after switched her to the finance portfolio.
Though no economist, she proved deft at dealing with the erupting financial crisis that would threaten eurozone unity.