WORLD: Carla Bruni and Nicolas Sarkozy spends £660 a day on flowers

Nicolas Sarkozy and Carla Bruni have been ordered to cut back after it emerged they were spending more than £660 a day on flowers.

The French president and his wife also used taxpayers' money to settle £3,000 worth of fines for late payment of electricity and gas bills.

But it is their annual florists' bill which has caused astonishment. At £241,000 it is even greater than that of Elton John, who once revealed he spent £460 a day on flowers.

The £660-a-day emerged in presidential accounts for 2008, Mr Sarkozy's first full year in office, during which he made Ms Bruni his third wife. The supermodel turned singer is fond of fresh flowers, and is frequently pictured arranging huge vases of them inside the Elysée.

In his report Philippe Séguin, France's national auditor, also said he had ordered Mr Sarkozy to pay back £12,000 in personal bills which he had put through the public accounts.

The president asked for the receipts for the undisclosed items to be returned to him, so that they would not create a public outcry. Money spent on flowers will not be repaid.

The figures were part of the first state audit of a French leader's expenditure since the reign of Louis XVI. His outrageous spending with Marie Antoinette, his queen, was one of the causes of the 1789 French Revolution, during which they were beheaded.

On becoming president in 2007 Mr Sarkozy awarded himself a pay rise of 140 per cent, taking his salary to around £160,000 a year. Ms Bruni, an Italian heiress, is a multi-millionaire in her own right.

An Elysée spokesman said the flower bill was now being reduced, and that the 2008 figures were a move towards "transparent government".