EX-IMF chief files suit against maid

DISGRACED EX-IMF chief Dominique Strauss-kahn has filed a $1million (about R8.1-million) countersuit against the New York hotel maid at the centre of last year’s explosive sexual assault allegations.

A year after the scandal broke, the former French Socialist Party presidential hopeful accused the maid, Nafissatou Diallo, of “intentionally making a false report to law-enforcement authorities,” the New York Post said yesterday citing court documents.

The countersuit lodged on Monday at the Bronx Supreme Court claims the maid’s “malicious and wanton false allegation” undermined Strauss-kahn’s reputation and damaged “other professional opportunities,” said the filing, without specifying political ambitions that were rocked by the scandal, the Post said.

Before the allegations brought down the International Monetary Fund chief in the wake of his arrest last year in New York, StraussKahn, 62, was seen as a champion of France’s Socialist Party and expected to beat vulnerable President Nicolas Sarkozy at the polls this year. Instead Socialist candidate Francois Hollande stood against Sarkozy and won.

The Post said Strauss-kahn’s suit also charges Diallo with “malicious prosecution, abuse of process, false imprisonment, defamation and intentional infliction of emotional distress”.

His legal team was able to undermine the maid’s criminal case last year, but he has been helpless against a US judge who rejected his claim to diplomatic immunity and ordered a civil trial to go ahead.

Meanwhile in recent weeks Strauss-kahn has been implicated in a prostitution ring probe in northern France, although he has insisted he was unaware women at the numerous orgies he took part in were prostitutes. — SAPA-AFP