to appreciate the regularity of campaign accounts, in application of a law passed in January 1990. The Council examined the campaign accounts with what Jean-Claude Zarka, a professor of constitutional law, called "obvious caution" and Pierre Moscovici, the campaign treasurer of the socialist Lionel Jospin, "eminent diplomacy". The campaign accounts of 8 candidates were approved, some with modifications, but those of Jacques Cheminade were rejected. According to Zarka, Cheminade was "financed after the vote by substantial gifts from private persons". The ruling of the Council said 2.3 million francs of private loans had to be qualified as gifts because of their relative importance in the accounts and the absence of interests. Moreover, 1.7 million francs, "over a third of the total of his declared receipts", was contracted after the second round. Following the rejection of his accounts, Cheminade was deprived of the lump-sum reimbursement of his campaign expenses and required to reimburse a million francs he had received from the state at the start of the campaign. In further observations, the Council recommended private loans to presidential candidates should be prohibited. Notwithstanding, Cheminade claimed the Civil code did not require a loan to bear interest, an assertion later confirmed by a lawyer specialized in civil law consulted by Le Journal du Dimanche. He also claimed Roland Dumas, the president of the Council, had a conflict of interest with him, having represented his opponents in a libel case some years earlier. Cheminade appealed to the European Court of Justice, but his appeal was rejected. The Court estimated "the patrimonial incidence of a procedure pertaining to the conditions of practice of a right of political nature does nor confer to it a civil nature" and "the decision of the Constitutional Council has not deprived the plaintiff of property in any amount of money but has only obliged the plaintiff to reimburse to the state a million francs because he did not meet the legal conditions to claim the contractual reimbursement of the campaign expenses". In November 2010, in the wake of an on the financing of Édouard Balladur's 1995 presidential campaign, Raphaëlle Bacqué and Pascale Robert-Diard wrote in Le Monde the Constitutional Council had hesitated to validate his campaign accounts, as they showed 10 million francs in receipts of unknown origin. This, according to Le Parisien, was later confirmed by Jacques Robert, a member of the court. According to Les Inrockuptibles, Jacques