LILLE, France: Former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn was released from police custody Wednesday after being questioned for two days in a prostitution case.

Strauss-Kahn, whose IMF job and prospects of becoming next French president ended in May after his arrest in New York on now-dropped sex assault charges, will have to meet with a judge for further questioning, a court said, without giving a date.

That could open the door to a formal investigation being opened against him in the case, which centers on allegations that a prostitution ring organized by business acquaintances of Strauss-Kahn supplied clients of Lille’s luxury Carlton Hotel.

“He answered all the questions,” said his lawyer, Frederique Beaulieu. “The fact that he was able to leave is a good thing, it’s normal that he can go free if he’s answered all the questions.”

Newspaper JDD reported on its website that the meeting would take place on March 28. Police want to establish whether Strauss-Kahn knew that women at parties he attended in Lille, Paris and Washington were prostitutes.

His lawyer has said he had no reason to think the women were prostitutes, noting it was not always easy to tell the difference between a “classy lady” and a prostitute when they were naked.

Investigators can either drop all pursuit of Strauss-Kahn or formally put him under investigation.

He could be investigated on suspicion of complicity in a pimping operation or of having benefited from misappropriated company funds if he knowingly attended sessions with prostitutes that company executives he knew paid for using expense accounts.

Strauss-Kahn, 62, made no comment as he arrived by car for questioning early Tuesday at Lille police station.

He quit his globe-trotting job at the head of the International Monetary Fund after he was accused of trying to rape a New York chambermaid.

United States prosecutors dropped the criminal charges against him because of concerns about the credibility of the plaintiff.

On his return home in September, French public prosecutors shelved a separate sex assault complaint by a French writer on the grounds that she had filed her grievance almost a decade after the event and too late under the statute of limitations.

Then the Lille affair surfaced, with relentless and at times salacious media leaks further soiling his reputation.

Denouncing what they called a media lynching, Strauss-Kahn’s lawyers said they would sue several publications and demanded in October that he be summoned by Lille investigators so that he could explain himself.

One issue intriguing U.S. jurists is whether any visits that escort girls paid Strauss-Kahn while he was living in the United States might expose him to pursuit under a U.S. law that prohibits transporting people across state lines for the purposes of prostitution.

“If it’s shown he had prostitutes come to America and cross state lines in America, he is potentially opening himself to charges under American law,” said Christophe Mesnooh, a Paris-based Franco-American lawyer who has no business involvement in the inquiry.

However, other legal experts said prosecutors tended to resort to the U.S. law in question, the Mann Act, against suppliers and organizers of prostitution enterprises, rather than clients.