Paris

Fancy setting up home in a French government ministry? Or retreat to a royal hunting lodge? Sign up now for a sale of 1,700 properties online supersize by the French, trying to throw dilapidated, expensive to maintain buildings and chip away at the country’s record debt.

Foreigners are welcome to join the bidding, Budget Minister Francois Baroin, said in announcing the sell-off Thursday – but the money must be clean. Any buyer, whether a movie star, the taxpayers of foreign governments or ordinary, will undergo a thorough background.

To release a long-term list of state properties for sale to the public for the first time the government seems determined to avoid the kind of controversy and secrecy that have dogged some past sales of French property, both public and private to shade or magnates deposed despots.

The properties in question include palaces, as one of Thonon-les-Bains, built in 1800 and landed on the shores of Lake Geneva at the foot of the Alps. Another is a royal hunting lodge, and guest house built in the previous century, in the west forest of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Paris. “The vacant buildings for many years. Restoration needs,” reads a list of government to the property.

France, with its history of strong, centralized state, has too many properties, said Baroin, disproportionate in comparison with other countries. The state should get rid of “useless and adapted buildings.” The plan announced Wednesday provides sales provided from now until the end of 2013.

“Contributing to the reduction of debt” is one of the reasons for sales, said Baroin, although I would not give an overall estimate of the value of the 1,700 properties. And it seems that the actual benefits of the state of goods make much dent in France euro1.49 billion debt, which amounts to about 77 percent of gross domestic product, according to state statistics agency.

Less than 20 percent of income property for sale will go directly to debt payments, with the rest of the investments of the new government. Of Euro 3 million in revenue from sales of state assets since 2005, said the minister, only euro427 million went to debt.

The sale is part of a larger effort to reduce bureaucracy in a country where more than one third of workers are employed by the State.

Much of the properties for sale belong to the Ministry of Defence, which is undergoing a sweeping rehaul for the small army, art and technology focused. The Defense Ministry is moving to a new facility under construction in the southwest of Paris that some dub a Pentagon French “, after which the former Ministry of Defence of the buildings along the elite, left artery Bank, Boulevard Saint-Germain, will be held.

DIB local authorities to raise first in the properties for sale, but if they are not interested, the bidding is open to anyone. All sales are subject to verification that “the origin of the funds can not be present challenges to laws against money laundering,” according to materials in the liquidation of the Ministry budget.

This is a sensitive issue at the time in France, where the former Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega is going to trial this month on charges of cocaine washed product through French banks and bought three apartments in Paris for his wife in the decade 1980.

The anti-corruption groups are awaiting appeals decision of the French court in a civil lawsuit filed against the presidents of Gabon, Equatorial Guinea and the Republic of Congo, accused of buying properties in France worth millions of euros that Human rights groups say was embezzled from state resources.

The president of one group, Daniel Lebegue of Transparency International France, stressed that the property affected in the event that African presidents were private, not public.

He welcomed government proposals to verify the origin of the money used to buy state property.

“If the government had been more diligent in implementing the controls before that date could have avoided a situation in which these African leaders were able to squander public funds with impunity …” she told The Associated Press Wednesday.

Francisco Cahuzac, president of the French Committee for the Protection of Historic and Rural, said the “long” sale of government property was “a sign that the state no longer had the means to maintain a property value.”

“What matters is that the properties are protected, regardless of whether the owner is abroad or government. In most cases, foreigners are very good at restoring old buildings,” he said.

The budget minister, speaking to the mayors and legislators in his ministry Wednesday, tried to assuage fears that France, so proud of their culture and history and status as a tourist destination in the world most popular, was selling his soul.

“Our goal is not selling just to sell, without any regard for the future of our heritage,” he said.