International Monetary Fund (IMF) chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn was arrested and charged on Sunday with sexually assaulting a New York hotel maid, in a scandal that appeared to wreck his hopes of running for president of France. The charges threatened to create a leadership vacuum at the IMF, overseer of the global economic system, and threw wide open the French presidential election next April, for which opinion polls had made Strauss-Kahn the front-runner.
One of his lawyers, Benjamin Brafman, told Reuters that his client “will plead not guilty.” The 62-year-old Socialist, a key player in the response to the 2007-9 global financial meltdown and in Europe’s debt crisis, was taken off an Air France plane about to leave for Paris at the John F Kennedy International Airport on Saturday. The news caused shock and disbelief in France, where a government spokesman called for caution and respect for the presumption of innocence.
The Fund said in a statement on its website that it “remains fully functioning and operational”, and had no comment on the case. A 32-year-old maid filed a sexual assault complaint after fleeing the $3,000-a-night hotel suite at the Sofitel in Times Square where the alleged incident occurred around 1pm on Saturday.
