Hollande to order France finance audit if elected

French presidential election frontrunner Francois Hollande said on Thursday he would order an audit of public finances if elected in May, a day after setting an ambitious timetable for implementing his tax-and-spend promises.The Socialist candidate, leading conservative President Nicolas Sarkozy in polls for a May 6 run-off, made the announcement hours before his rival was to present a costed manifesto in his uphill battle for re-election.“We’ll have the Court of Auditors carry out an evaluation immediately ... and freeze certain spending once we have the results,” Hollande said in an interview on Canal+ television.The move appeared designed both to steal some of Sarkozy’s thunder and to prepare the ground for austerity measures that could be blamed on his predecessor’s handling of France’s debt and deficit.It also came after a cover story in the Economist weekly entitled “France in Denial” made waves in political circles by accusing both leading candidates of lacking serious ideas for tackling the country’s economic and fiscal problems.Hollande and his allies derided Sarkozy for waiting until less than three weeks from the first round of voting on April 22 to produce a comprehensive manifesto. “It’s not very serious,” said Socialist Party chief Martine Aubry, who made a point of noting that Hollande had presented a fully costed manifesto in January.“Sarkozy’s programme is his record of the past five years, only worse,” said Hollande, whose main line of attack is that the wealthy rather than the needy were the big beneficiaries of tax giveaways since 2007.