Magistrates in charge of a lengthy investigation into a series of suspected corruption scams surrounding L’Oréal heiress Liliane Bettencourt have uncovered further evidence, described by one source close to the case as “solid”, suggesting that part of the billionaire’s fortune was used to illegally fund outgoing French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s 2007 election campaign.
Sarkozy, who will hand over office to newly-elected François Hollande on Tuesday, when he will lose immunity from prosecution, faces mounting suspicion that his successful 2007 campaign was also illegally financed by the late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi.
In February, Sarkozy’s 2007 election campaign treasurer, Eric Woerth, 56, was placed under formal investigation in the Bettencourt case for “handling" illegal funding of Sarkozy’s campaign and for “influence peddling”. Woerth, 56, a former budget and labour minister, was also treasurer of Sarkozy’s UMP party between 2002 and 2010. Woerth, a Member of Parliament and mayor of the town of Chantilly, north of Paris, has denied any role in illegal funding of the campaign.
As Mediapart reported in March, Bordeaux-based investigating judge Jean-Michel Gentil has already established that two, separate 400,000-euro cash withdrawals were made from Bettencourt’s Swiss bank accounts in February and April 2007, when Sarkozy was running for the presidency. The timing of the withdrawals matches other evidence in the case suggesting the money was destined to help fund Sarkozy’s bid.
René Merckt, a Geneva-based lawyer who for some 30 years managed the secret, tax-dodging accounts in Switzerland belonging to Bettencourt and her late husband André, has told the investigation that the L’Oréal matriarch’s former wealth manager, Patrice de Maistre, personally ordered the withdrawals.
These were made via a complex ‘compensatory’ financial route, by which the sums were issued in banknotes in Paris from the offices of a securities firm which had previously been credited with the same amount in Switzerland.
Merckt, who was questioned earlier this month for the third time by the Swiss authorities acting in cooperation with the Bordeaux judge, testified that no such withdrawals had been made from accounts belonging to Bettencourt and her husband prior to February 2007.
It has been established that Maistre and Woerth met together in Paris on February 7th 2007, two days after the first 400,000-euro cash withdrawal was made. The two men have confirmed their meeting, which they have described as a social occasion.
Maistre, 63, has been held in preventive detention in a jail near Bordeaux since March 23rd. He was last year placed under investigation – one step short of being charged – for suspected corruption and for “abuse” of the mental frailty of Liliane Bettencourt, 89, who, a medical report has established, suffers from a progressive state of dementia that had already begun in 2007. She is also partially deaf.
The majority shareholder of L'Oréal, the world's largest cosmetics company which was founded by her father, Eugène Schueller, Bettencourt has a personal fortune estimated by Forbes in 2011 to total 17 billion euros, making her one of the wealthiest individuals in France and the wealthiest woman in Europe.
Among the evidence held by Gentil is a diary belonging to François-Marie Banier, a Parisian socialite once close to the widowed Bettencourt and who is under investigation in a parallel enquiry by the Bordeaux magistrates for defrauding the billionaire of almost 1 billion euros. It contains an entry written on the same day as the second 400,000-euro cash withdrawal, on April 26th 2007, which read: “De Maistre tells me that Sarkozy is again asking for money”.
On March 22nd this year, the day before Maistre was jailed, the judge wrote a formal summary of the evidence against Bettencourt’s former wealth manager, in which he noted that “witnesses have given testimony of a visit to the Bettencourt household by [then] Minister of the Interior Nicolas Sarkozy during the 2007 electoral campaign” and advised that further investigations into the allegations of cash donations to Sarkozy’s campaign “are therefore necessary”.
Enlargement : Illustration 2
Sarkozy began his bid for the presidential office while he served as then-President Jacques Chirac’s interior minister, with Woerth appointed as his campaign treasurer. After Sarkozy’s election in May 2007, Woerth was appointed budget minister, when he is also suspected to have abused his position to convince Patrice de Maistre to employ his wife, Florence Woerth, as an investment advisor for Bettencourt; two months after she was hired in November 2007 on a yearly salary of 200,000 euros, Woerth decorated Maistre with the Légion d’honneur, France’s highest award for civil merit.
A source close to the investigation, who asked not to be named, told Mediapart: “Judge Gentil has worked hard on the political financing lead. Solid elements indicate that funds were handed to Eric Woerth, but for the moment there is no proof concerning Nicolas Sarkozy. Unless one entertains the thought, like some malicious [people], that the candidate went to thank the Bettencourts.”
Weekly news magazine L’Express last month revealed that a 2007 agenda belonging to Liliane Bettencourt, also seized as evidence in the case, contained a note made out for her attention against the date of February 24th 2007 that read: “At midday for Monsieur Nicolas S. For [your] information.”
The note apparently indicated that Nicolas Sarkozy was due to meet at midday with Liliane’s husband André, commonly addressed by his household staff as “Monsieur”.
Mediapart has now learnt from sources close to the case that Judge Gentil has gained further evidence suggesting that Sarkozy also visited the Bettencourt home during the two weeks between the first and second rounds of the elections, held on April 22nd and May 6th, when the second 400,000-euro cash withdrawal was made from the Bettencourt couple’s Swiss accounts.
A scandal that began as a family affair
For many years, André Bettencourt, a businessman and former minister under several conservative governments who died from cancer in November 2007, received politicians from the Right and centre-right parties at the couple’s sprawling townhouse in the upmarket Paris suburb of Neuilly, where Sarkozy began his political career as mayor.
Following the report in L’Express, Sarkozy was questioned about the February 24th 2007 appointment. “I don’t know what I did five years ago, but if the question is ‘Could you have met André Bettencourt?’, of course,” he said. “But where’s the problem? What’s the story? What’s the news?”
“Why do you want there to have been illegal financing [of the campaign] when the receipts and spending were checked to the millimeter and there was not a shadow of doubt?” he asked.
Meanwhile, Maistre was called in to Judge Gentil’s office for more questioning last Thursday. On top of the suspicion that he organized the two cash withdrawals totaling 800,000 euros for the illegal funding, via Woerth, of Sarkozy’s campaign, Maistre, whose role as Bettencourt’s wealth manager was that of protecting her fortune, is also suspected of using other cash sums from her Swiss accounts for his own personal enrichment.
In total, seven withdrawals have been traced between 2007 and 2009, amounting to 4 million euros, all of which, Merckt said, were ordered by Maistre. In secret tape recordings of his conversations with the billionaire, made between 2009 and 2010 by Bettencourt’s butler and revealed by Mediapart in June 2010, Maistre asked her for a gift of 1 million euros for his intended purchase of a yacht.
At the end of the nine-hours of questioning by Gentil, about which no significant detail emerged publicly, Maistre was again remanded in preventive detention, at the prison of Gradignan, near Bordeaux. His continued incarceration is officially justified by Gentil as necessary to avoid other witnesses bringing pressure upon him to influence his statements. His lawyers, however, complained that he was being kept in jail to “pressure” him into confessing that he took part in the illegal campaign funding.
Last week, investigative weekly Le Canard enchaîné revealed that Maistre’s wife Anne, the former spouse of LVMH luxury goods group owner Bernard Arnault, has been barred from visiting him in prison any further after a bundle of clothes that she had brought to him was found to contain a mobile phone. News agency Agence France-Presse subsequently reported that she had claimed the phone, which belonged to her, had been accidentally forgotten amid the clothes.
Initial evidence of the suspected illegal funding of Sarkozy's 2007 campaign emerged in July 2010, after Mediapart published an exclusive interview with Bettencourt’s former accountant, Claire Thibout, in which she said Maistre asked her, in January 2007, to help prepare 150,000 euros in cash, drawn from Bettencourt’s accounts, which she was allegedly told was to be handed to Woerth.
Thibout's comments were one element of a major political and financial scandal sparked by Liliane Bettencourt's donations to French high-society dandy, celebrity photographer and one-time author, François-Marie Banier, of gifts, including art works and insurance policies, valued at 1 billion euros.
Liliane’s daughter and only child, Françoise Bettencourt-Meyers, now 58, launched legal action against Banier for "abuse" of Liliane's mental frailty, and engaged on a lengthy legal procedure to have her mother made a ward of court. The move was bitterly opposed by Liliane, who said she gave the gifts to Banier of her free will, and accused her daughter of acting in jealousy over her closeness with the socialite. Banier is now also placed under investigation by the judges in Bordeaux.
The family feud ignited into a larger scandal in June 2010, when Mediapart exclusively revealed secret recordings of conversations between Liliane Bettencourt and her close entourage of advisors, notably Maistre, taped by Bettencourt’s butler, Pascal Bonnefoy, between 2009 and 2010. The tapes, which were handed over to police, revealed evidence of tax evasion, influence peddling, illegal political funding and interference in justice proceedings by a French presidential advisor. (A list of links to a selection of Mediapart articles about the scandal can be found immediately below). Bonnefoy said he made the recordings after he became aware of the corrupt activities of the mentally-frail billionaire's entourage.
Following the revelation that Bettencourt held secret bank accounts in Switzerland, they were closed last year when the money was returned to France. She was subsequently ordered by the French tax authorities to pay almost 78 million euros in back payments for the undeclared accounts and other assets. Earlier in 2011, Bettencourt was one of 16 of France's wealthiest individuals who launched a public appeal for the super-rich to pay more in taxes, a move that followed a similar call led by US billionaire Warren Buffett.
On February 16th this year, Nicolas Sarkozy travelled to the town of Annecy on the first official trip of his re-election bid, one week after Eric Woerth was placed under investigation for “handling" illegal financing of the 2007 campaign and for “influence peddling”. Approached by Mediapart for a reaction, he replied: “Listen. What are you asking me about that? I am here, in Annecy, I don’t want to talk about that. Listen, we’re in a democracy, and one has the right not to answer questions. You have the right to ask them, I have the right not to answer.”
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For more on the Bettencourt affair and issues raised in this article, click on the links below:
Judge links L'Oréal heiress cash withdrawals to Sarkozy campaign funding
Sarkozy campaign treasurer under investigation for illegal funding, influence peddling
L'Oréal heiress ordered to pay 77.7 million euros after tax scam probe
Behind the bettencourt affair: the battle for L'Oréal
A scandal too far: Bettencourt magistrate is disowned
French prosecutor in Bettencourt affair illegally spied journalists' phone calls
The eerie plot penned by L'Oréal family scandal dandy in 1971
Dinners, cash and Sarkozy: what Bettencourt's accountant told Mediapart
Bettencourt butler bites back: 'I saw L'Oréal family destroyed'
Bettencourt battle back after L'Oréal heiress signs away 143 million euros
The political guard watching over L'Oréal
Bettencourt chauffeur adds to Sarkozy campaign fund allegations
Bettencourt tapes stolen in mystery break-ins targetting Mediapart, Le Point and Le Monde
French interior minister drops libel action against Mediapart
Why we need a strong media in France
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English version: Graham Tearse