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NSA eavesdropped on France finance ministers: WikiLeaks

Tuesday, 30 June 2015 12:17 AM [ Last Update: Tuesday, 30 June 2015 9:37 AM ]

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Whistleblower website WikiLeaks says the US National Security Agency (NSA) eavesdropped on two successive French finance ministers and the country’s high-stakes export contracts, trade and budget talks over a decade.

According to new documents released by the transparency website on Monday, the NSA wiretapped the communications of two finance ministers -- Francois Baroin and Pierre Moscovici -- and three other senior officials between 2004 and 2012.

It added that the agency called intelligence services from Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada, and New Zealand to collect information on France’s export bids worth more than $200 million from 2002-2012 in sectors including oil, gas, telecommunications, electricity, nuclear energy, transport and health.

The WikiLeaks documents say the NSA spying targeted information about France’s budget and trade policy as well as French companies' role in the oil-for-food program in Iraq in the 1990s.

Neither France nor the US made an immediate reaction to the leaked documents in French publications Mediapart and Liberation.

The Wikileaks documents did not name a specific French company.

The new documents came a week after Wikileaks reported that the NSA had spied on the last three French presidents from 2006 to 2012.

The NSA wiretapped the former French presidents, Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy, as well the current leader, Francois Hollande, WikiLeaks said in a press statement published on June 23, citing top secret intelligence reports and technical documents.

WikiLeaks said the NSA surveillance targeted the communications of Hollande (2012–present), Sarkozy (2007–2012) and Chirac (1995–2007), as well as French cabinet ministers and the French ambassador to the US.