REUTERS PARIS LAWYERS for embattled former International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn said on Tuesday they would challenge a fresh official investigation into allegations he illegally participated in pimping in France.

Strauss-Kahn’s French legal team called a news conference in response to overnight news he had been formally placed under investigation in a prostitution scandal in the northern city of Lille on counts that could expose their client to up to 20 years in jail.

“This story doesn’t have legs to stand on and the judges know it perfectly well,” one of his lawyers, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said before the press conference.

Strauss-Kahn’s latest problems come in a week when the man once tipped to become France’s next president is back under fire in New York too.

Hearings in a civil case brought by a woman who accused him of trying to rape her in a Sofitel hotel suite last May begin on Wednesday.

In France, investigators are probing whether Strauss-Kahn, 62, was aware he was dealing with prostitutes and pimps when he participated in sexual encounters in Lille, Paris and Washington in 2010 and 2011 that had been organised by business acquaintances in the region. Eight people have already been arrested in the case, and a construction firm Eiffage fired an executive suspected of using company funds to hire sex workers. Strauss- Kahn - a former finance minister and globe-trotting head of the IMF - is married to popular journalist Anne Sinclair.

He has been quoted as acknowledging his participation in “libertine soirees”.