Former International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn is being questioned Tuesday by French police investigating a suspected hotel prostitution ring.
Mr. Strauss-Kahn arrived at the police station in the northern city of Lille around 0800 GMT, an Associated Press reporter saw.
Police are probing a suspected prostitution ring in France and neighbouring Belgium that has implicated police and other officials. They have questioned commercial sex workers who said they had sex with Mr. Strauss-Kahn during 2010 and 2011 at a luxury hotel in Paris, a restaurant in the French capital and also in Washington, D.C. Mr. Strauss-Kahn lived in the U.S. capital while he was head of the IMF before resigning his position in May.
Two men with ties to Mr. Strauss-Kahn have been put under preliminary investigation in France on charges including organizing a prostitution ring and misuse of corporate funds.
Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s name surfaced in the investigation last fall and his lawyer has asked that he be allowed to tell his side of the story.
French newspapers have dubbed the investigation “The Carlton Affair” after the name of the expensive Lille hotel where some of the meetings took place.
Investigators are seeking to discover if sex workers were paid using corporate funds from a large French construction company.
It is Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s latest run-in with police over alleged sexual misconduct.
Mr. Strauss-Kahn was charged by New York police in May with making a hotel maid perform oral sex.
New York prosecutors dropped the case against him in August because the woman had undercut her credibility by lying about her background and changing her account of her actions right after the alleged attack. She says she was truthful about the encounter and is pursuing her claims in a lawsuit.
In a separate case last October, French prosecutors refused to pursue an allegation by a young French writer of attempted rape by Strauss-Kahn.
The Paris prosecutor’s office dropped the investigation into the writer’s claim that Mr. Strauss-Kahn tried to rape her during a 2003 interview for a book she was writing, saying they couldn’t send him to trial because it happened too long ago.
