Dominique de Villepin questioned in fraud investigation Dominique de Villepin, who denied any wrongdoing when the fraud affair surfaced last December. Photograph: Bertrand Guay/AFP/Getty Images The French former prime minister and one-time presidential hopeful Dominique de Villepin has been taken into police custody for questioning by magistrates investigating a suspected financial scam involving a luxury hotel network. Villepin, who served under the former president Jacques Chirac as his chief-of-staff, foreign minister and ultimately prime minister from 2005 to 2007, was questioned about his links with a man suspected of financial fraud, a police spokesman said. The 58-year-old, best known internationally for announcing Chirac's refusal to join a war against Saddam Hussein's Iraq in an impassioned speech at the United Nations in 2003, denied any wrongdoing when the fraud affair surfaced last December. Magistrates are investigating whether a friend and political backer of Villepin siphoned off large sums of money when he was in charge of an association of luxury hotels called Relais & Chateaux. Villepin was dragged into the investigation after police phone taps exposed links between him and the man at the centre of the inquiry, Regis Bulot, president of the Relais & Chateaux network until 2006 and a member of a Villepin support club. The affair surfaced when Villepin was on the verge of entering the May presidential election race, a move he ultimately abandoned. When he was linked to the case in December he told the Le Monde daily newspaper: "It's unbearable that I am being implicated in a matter I have nothing to do with." Le Monde said at the time it had access to phone tap records that raised police suspicions about possible attempts by Villepin to influence judicial inquiries into Bulot. Villepin, a prolific writer who has a legal firm of his own, has gone from one judicial imbroglio to another since his time as prime minister ended and his presidential ambitions started to take shape. A year ago, an appeals court cleared him of charges that he took part in a smear campaign against his arch-foe Nicolas Sarkozy, who replaced Chirac as president and was unseated himself last May by the Socialist François Hollande.