French President Nicolas Sarkozy and his Prime Minister François Fillon were under increasing pressure Tuesday to explain the extraordinary protection they have afforded to a former senior Libyan official identified in a document published by Mediapart as a principal figure involved in the secret funding of Sarkozy’s 2007 election campaign by the late dictator Muammar Gaddafi.
Bashir Saleh, 65, once head of Gaddafi’s 40-billion dollar Libyan Africa Investment Portfolio (LAP), a sovereign wealth investment fund, is the subject of an Interpol ‘wanted persons’ notice issued for his arrest pending a procedure for his extradition to Libya where he is wanted on fraud charges. Despite the Interpol ‘red notice’ appeal, Saleh continues to live comfortably in France where he was issued with a residency permit after fleeing Libya following the toppling of the Gaddafi regime last autumn.
In an exclusive report published April 28th, Mediapart revealed a document prepared in December 2006 and signed by Gaddafi’s foreign intelligence agency chief, Moussa Koussa, which detailed the former regime’s approval of a payment of 50 million euros for Sarkozy’s 2007 presidential election campaign. Saleh was to be tasked with supervising the payment.
Following the revelations, Sarkozy announced he was taking legal action against Mediapart, and he was lent support by both Saleh and Moussa Koussa – who now lives in exile in Qatar – who have each denied involvement in the secret funding of Sarkozy’s campaign by the former Libyan dictatorship.
Saleh is named on Interpol’s fugitive file (see here) as Bashir Al Shrkawi, the name in which a passport was issued to him in his native country Niger.
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Speaking in an interview Tuesday morning with RMC radio and BFM TV news channel, President Sarkozy said that if Saleh was sought by Interpol, “he will be handed over to Interpol”.
“On the Interpol arrest warrant, there is another [different] identity,” he continued. “The services of the foreign affairs ministry and the interior ministry are in the process of looking at the issue.”
On Monday, Prime Minister François Fillon told RTL radio that he knew of “no trace of an international arrest warrant” regarding Saleh. “Naturally, if there was an international arrest warrant against him, France would place him at the disposition of the justice authorities, after discussions with Niger, which would be necessary given his diplomatic status,” Fillon said.
However, later on Monday the Nigerien authorities announced that Saleh had handed back his diplomatic passport in March.
“The red notices are one of the one the means by which Interpol informs its 190 member countries that an arrest warrant has been issued for a person by a judicial authority,” an Interpol press officer told Mediapart. “It is not an international arrest warrant. The people concerned are sought by national courts, or by international criminal courts, and the role of Interpol is to help police services in identifying them or localizing them with a view to their arrest and extradition.”
While Interpol cannot force a member country to arrest someone who is the subject of a ‘wanted persons’ notice, the organisation’s press office said “numerous member countries however give the red notice the status of a provisional arrest request, especially if they are linked by bi-lateral extradition treaty to the demander country.”
It is unclear whether the fraud charges issued against Saleh in Libya are connected to his management of the LAP. Contacted by Mediapart, the Libyan ambassador to France, Abuhamoud Al Shibani, declined to comment.
Already in early April, French investigative weekly Le Canard enchaîné reported that Saleh enjoyed official French protection. According to the Canard enchaîné report, it was France’s ambassador to Tunisia, Boris Boillon, who oversaw Saleh’s escape from Libya, when he was flown to France in a private jet belonging to controversial French businessman Alexandre Djouhri.
Interior minister Claude Guéant has himself confirmed that a residency permit had been delivered to Saleh and his family. Guéant told the Canard enchaîné that Saleh was given “a provisional three-month authorization to stay [in France] because his family resides in France”.
The favour shown to Saleh by the French interior minister circumnavigates the restrictive regulations concerning the delivery of residency permits to foreign immigrants. Under these – which were toughened by Nicolas Sarkozy when he was interior minister, and subsequently under his presidency - it is, in Saleh’s case, only his spouse, Kafa Kachour Bashir, and not the family, who is entitled to apply for a residency permit on his behalf. To do so, she must prove that she has been legally resident in France for at least 18 months, that she has adequate financial means and lodgings.
Furthermore, it is the mayor of the locality where the spouse resides who is required to judge whether the spouse’s financial means and lodgings meet the necessary criteria, after which a temporary residency permit may be delivered – in which case it is valid for one year, and not the three months indicated by Guéant.
The mystery surrounding the circumstances of Bashir’s residency in France is further deepened by the ruling of a court in Bourg-en-Bresse, east-central France, on April 25th, which sentenced Bashir’s wife to a two-year suspended jail term and a 70,000-euro fine for having employed four domestic servants in her luxurious holiday home in the region “in working and living conditions incompatible with human dignity”, for “undeclared employment”, and for “aiding the illegal residency and employment of foreign nationals without working permits”. The court heard that Kafa Kachour Bashir, 56, who holds joint French and Lebanese nationality and who was described as spending but several months a year in France, had first hired the four Tanzanians in Libya. She was not present during the trial, held in March, and has since launched an appeal against the sentence.
In an interview Monday with news agency AFP, Saleh’s French lawyer, Marcel Ceccaldi, recognised that his client was the object of an Interpol ‘wanted persons’ alert, but questioned its validity. “How can Interpol issue a provisional arrest order [sic] on the request of the Libyan authorities?” he asked. “What is Libya? The Islamists in Tripoli? The Bengazi separatists? The armed gangs in Misrata? What democratic country would take the risk of arresting someone for their transfer to Libya?”
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For more about the issues raised in this article, click on the links to Mediapart's investigations below:
Exclusive: secret report describes Gaddafi funding of Sarkozy's 2007 election campaig
French IT group Bull horned by Libyan internet espionage deal
French judge finds key evidence in illegal funding probe
Net closes in on French presidency after funding 'scam' arrests
Arms dealer probe brings illegal funding scandal closer to Sarkozy
The secret financier who brings danger to the Sarkozy clan
Sarkozy, the arms dealer, and a secret 350 million-euro commission
Exclusive: how Sarkozy's team sought grace for Gaddafi's murderous henchman
Exlusive: how President Sarkozy's team dealt with Gaddafi
When Total paid the bill for the Elysée's secret emissary
The French-built stealth offroader that may be hiding Gaddafi
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English version: Graham Tearse