France's former ambassador to Libya, François Gouyette, has told investigating magistrates that two well-placed sources in the regime informed him that Muammar Gaddafi's government funded Nicolas Sarkozy's successful campaign for the French presidency in 2007. Gouyette, who is now ambassador to neighbouring Tunisia but who was France's man in Tripoli from January 2008 to February 2011, was giving evidence to judges Emmanuelle Legrand and René Cros who are investigating the complaint by Nicolas Sarkozy over this website's publication in April 2012 of a document showing that the Libyan regime had funded his campaign. Sarkozy, who has denied the claims, has accused Mediapart of using a false document.
Questioned in January about the issue, François Gouyette told the judges of the two Libyans he spoke to who confirmed the existence of a payment to the Sarkozy campaign. One is a senior figure whose identity he preferred not to give in order to prevent “negative consequences for him”. The second figure is Gaddafi's former official interpreter Moftah Missouri, who has since publicly confirmed the authenticity of the document published by Mediapart in 2012.
The French ambassador said he questioned his contacts about the issue “having heard the declarations of Saif al-Islam on February 22nd, 2011 [editor's note, in which Gaddafi's son stated that Libya had funded Sarkozy and that the French president should return the money]”. Gouyette continued: “Before leaving Libya, I had a conversation with a Libyan contact who had belonged to Gaddafi's inner circle, to which he no longer belonged at that time, and so I asked him the question to find out...if he had heard talk of this financing that Saif al-Islam talked about, and this person told me that it was something that was known among those close to the Libyan government, and that there had indeed been funding of M. Sarkozy's presidential campaign.” The ambassador's source had not given details “either of the amounts nor of the practical details”, he told the judges.
At the end of 2011 François Gouyette had asked the same question of Moftah Missouri. “He told me that to his knowledge there had indeed been funding, that the money had been paid by Libya.” In 2013, questioned for the Complément d’enquête TV programme for public broadcaster France 2, Missouri said millions of dollars had been involved. “Even Gaddafi told me, verbally, that Libya had paid some 20 million dollars. Normally, here, at the presidency, when one gives money to someone there is no bank transfer, there's no cheque, it's cash in briefcases,” Missouri told the programme.
The interpreter had also commented on the document revealed by Mediapart in April 2012, which he said was “the outline document, if I dare say so, for the financial support of the presidential campaign of President Sarkozy”. He added: “It's a genuine document.”
In December 2013 the TV programme’s director Romain Verley confirmed Missouri's comments to police officers assisting the investigation. “He authenticated the document,” Verley told them. “He confirmed that it was a plan for funding. He told us that in a very assertive manner. He re-read it in Arabic, he re-translated it and confirmed its veracity.” Questioned about the checks that France 2 had carried out on the document, Verley said he had “contacted several [of our] sources in order to verify if the document was or was not genuine”. He concluded: “All our sources confirmed the authenticity of the document.”
During the giving of his evidence in January this year, French ambassador François Gouyette was asked by the judges to deliver his own opinion on the document and its translation. At the time of its publication his “impression” had been “that it could be a genuine document”, said the diplomat, recalling that a few months earlier a false document had been circulating on the share of Libyan oil reserves that had been reserved for France in the result of a victory by the Libyan rebels. This was a period when Western intervention in the growing conflict was imminent; military action by France and other countries in Libya began on March 19th, 2011.
Enlargement : Illustration 2
“When one has been shown official Libyan documents, as was the case with me for three years, this note at first glance gives the appearance of a Libyan document, noting that the headings do not appear, which seems curious to me,” Gouyette told the judges. “As for the document's typography, there is nothing unusual, it corresponds to documents that one has seen circulating coming from, for example, the Libyan ministry of foreign affairs.”
The fluent Arabic speaker, who had worked as a second secretary at the embassy in Tripoli in the 1980s, was also asked about the way the text was written. “On the issue of language, it is evidently a text written directly in Arabic by an Arab speaker, there’s no doubt about it for me. It's a text in written Arabic, in Arabic of an administrative character,” the ambassador told the judges. This contradicts the view spread in the press by those close to Sarkozy that the document had originally been written in French then translated into Arabic.
François Gouyette knew several of the official figures mentioned in the Libyan document published by Mediapart. These include the ex-head of foreign intelligence under Gaddafi, Moussa Koussa, Gaddafi's chief of staff Bashir Saleh, seen as one of the regime’s secret treasurers, and the country’s intelligence agency chief Abdullah Senussi. Senussi was also Gaddafi's brother-on-law and he was given a life sentence in absentia in France for his involvement in the bombing of a French airliner in 1989.
The ambassador said he had essentially seen Senussi when protocol demanded. “I had no relationship with him and didn't want to, as he was a person who was the subject of a conviction in France,” he told the judges. Mediapart has previously revealed how Nicolas Sarkozy's entourage and his lawyer Thierry Herzog had made every effort to try to get this senior Libyan figure cleared.
“Concerning M. Saleh I saw him several times, in particular twice when accompanying M. [Claude] Guéant [editor's note, Sarkozy's close ally and the former head of the Elysée Palace, then interior minister] when he was received by M. Gaddafi,” said Gouyette. The diplomat also referred to the French protection accorded to the Libyan regime’s treasurer at the time of Gaddafi's fall. “Bashir Saleh had been arrested in Libya and imprisoned in September 2011, France had intervened through its new intermediaries in Tripoli to ensure Bashir Saleh was not mistreated,” said François Gouyotte, “and I learnt later...that he was able to get to Tunisia where he had obtained a visa, and from there to France. Concerning his residency status [editor’s note, in France] all I can state simply is that Bashir Saleh has always had a special relationship with France, he also had a relationship with Claude Guéant.”
Below are some of the main articles published by Mediapart on this affair:
- Exclusive: secret report describes Gaddafi funding of Sarkozy's 2007 election campaign
- Gaddafi funding of Sarkozy election campaign: the proof
- Former Libyan PM confirms Gaddafi gave Sarkozy 50M euros for election campaign
- Another Gaddafi aide details Libyan funding of Sarkozy
- Gaddafi-Sarkozy corruption affair: ex-spy chief 'ready to help French investigation'
- Judicial investigation launched into Gaddafi's suspected financing of Sarkozy election campaign
- Extradited former Libyan premier wanted to speak to French judge over illegal election campaign funding
- French government stalls Interpol call for arrest of Gaddafi funding chief
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English version by Michael Streeter