The lawyer for a French executive held in a French Polynesian jail, Hubert Haddad, says his four month-long detention in Tahiti is baseless, claiming that the French authorities have manipulated papers to justify his arrest.
Mr Haddad is at the centre of a probe into alleged corruption involving the state-owned OPT telecommunications company and is accused of paying the local veteran politician, Gaston Flosse, two million US dollars in kickbacks for public sector contracts.
Mr Haddad's lawyer, Olivier Metzner, has told reporters in Papeete that the authorities ignored Mr Haddad's rights as a holder of a diplomatic passport from Burkina Faso when they detained him in France in May ahead of his transfer to Tahiti.
Mr Metzner, who wants the prosecution to nullify the arrest procedure, says everything has been decided and judged in advance.
He says the dating of the documents suggest that the case has been manipulated.
