and to the British games in Europe and beyond". In 1999, he wrote : "The cause of the war is not Iraq, or Yugoslavia, the United States, or even Britain. It is the financial oligarchy of the City of London and Wall Street which has declared war on the people, in Africa, in Russia, and elsewhere, where living standards and life expectancy are collapsing. The leading role in all cases has been played by the British." In 2000, Cheminade wrote "the assassins of the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King [...] were the same people who tried to murder de Gaulle, for the same oligarchical reasons". The same year, after the crash of Air France Flight 4590, he claimed it could be due to a sabotage, as the French authorities had "challenged the Anglo-American oligarchy in many areas". In 2000, Cheminade announced he would be a candidate in the 2002 presidential election. He did not succeed to reach the necessary 500 endorsements, gathering only 406 of them. He sued , another presidential candidate, for slander and was granted damages. Cheminade filed a complaint to the Conseil constitutionnel, arguing he had been the subject of press attacks to deter mayors from endorsing him. The claim was rejected. In 2001, Cheminade proposed the issuance of a gold based euro, "as a measure of national emergency under the present circumstances", with reference to "initiatives taken in Russia and Malaysia going in the same direction, with for example the issuance of the Russian golden chervonets". This was part of what LaRouche and Cheminade called a "new Bretton Woods", defined by Cheminade in 2003 as "a system of stable exchanges, based on a common reference, a gold-reserve system (and not a gold standard system), gold being used among states to settle their accounts, but not as a basis for credit". In 2004, Cheminade and Eric Sauzé, his party's candidate in the March 2004 Lyon county election were found guilty of slander against Dominique Perben, the minister of Justice, for the comparison in pictures of Philippe Pétain shaking hands with Adolf Hitler in Montoire-sur-le-Loir and Perben recently doing the same with U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft. Cheminade was condemned to pay a fine of 15,000 euros. The judgement considered the leaflet made "a comparison between two periods of the history of France that have strictly nothing in common in terms of human and citizens’ rights" and