After providing Mediapart with further information concerning allegations that President Nicolas Sarkozy’s 2007 election campaign was partly funded by former Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, the man at the centre of the controversy has now denounced a “crude manipulation” of his secret report detailing the alleged scam.
Jean-Charles Brisard, a French expert on terrorism and terrorist financing, had earlier told Mediapart how Brice Hortefeux, a longstanding close friend and political aide of the French president and who is now vice-president of France’s ruling UMP party, was the “front” in a financial network set up for the secret funding of Sarkozy’s 2007 election campaign by the Gaddafi regime. The Swiss-based consultant said he had a file containing “precise amounts, names, countries and dates.”
Brisard’s surprising about turn was made in correspondence received by Mediapart on Friday, and which is published on the following pages. It came after a week of a major political controversy that erupted after the allegations were first revealed by Mediapart on Monday. They centred on a document written by Brisard, a fact he does not contest, detailing the alleged operation in which the Tripoli regime funnelled 50 million euros towards Sarkozy’s 2007 election campaign, beginning in 2005.
Following Mediapart’s revelations, Green presidential candidate Eva Joly, a former investigating magistrate, demanded the opening of a judicial enquiry into the allegations which President Sarkozy, questioned on French television Monday evening, angrily dismissed as “grotesque”.
Mediapart gained exclusive access to the contents of the report and published extracts that were, as detailed in the article, precisely copied from the original textual presentation. Brisard has not challenged the veracity of the reproduced extracts.
Brisard, 43, who runs a private intelligence company called JCB Consulting, has notably served since 2002 as an investigator for lawyers representing relatives of the victims of the September 11th 2001 terrorist attacks in the US. He was also an advisor on economic intelligence for the former Vivendi Universal - now Vivendi - media corporation, and in 2008 he was awarded the rank of Knight of the French National Order of Merit.
During a recorded phone conversation with Mediapart on Thursday March 15th, before his sudden denouncement of what he called a “completely fabricated” document published for “purely political and malicious reasons at the height of the electoral campaign”, he clearly confirmed that he wrote the report cited by Mediapart.
Entitled ‘GEN/ NS V. MEMO DG’, Brisard’s report contains a series of notes summarizing confidential conversations he held in December 2006 with a French neurosurgeon, Didier Grosskopf, once a close acquaintance of Paris-based arms dealer Ziad Takieddine, a Franco-Lebanese businessmen currently implicated in an ongoing judicial investigation into suspected illegal political funding via commissions paid in French weapons sales abroad.
The investigation, led by Judges Renaud Van Ruymbeke and Roger Le Loire, centre on the sale of submarines to Pakistan and frigates to Saudi Arabia, mounted during the 1990s. They suspect that part of commissions paid to intermediaries in the deals were secretly re-routed to fund the 1995 presidential election campaign of former prime minister Edouard Balladur. They have collected evidence indicating that these so called retro-commissions re-appeared as unaccountable cash sums drawn from Swiss bank accounts.
Nicolas Sarkozy served under Balladur as budget minister and was his presidential election campaign spokesman. Both he and Balladur have denied involvement in illegal funding of the campaign, which was led as a breakaway challenge against fellow conservative Right rival Jacques Chirac, whose campaign was backed by the majority RPR Gaullist party.
Last September, Balladur’s presidential election campaign director, Nicolas Bazire, and an advisor to Sarkozy at the budget ministry, Thierry Gaubert, both longstanding friends of Sarkozy, were placed under investigation last September, along with Takieddine, over their involvement in the suspected scam, which has become dubbed in France as the 'Karachi Affair'.
Budget minister's sister opened Swiss bank account
Several years after the Balladur government-brokered arms deals, Takieddine again played a role as a key intermediary for weapons contracts mounted by Sarkozy’s inner political team, between 2002 and 2009 (1), with several Arab countries, and notably Libya. (A list of links to Mediapart investigations into Takieddine’s role and relationships with Sarkozy’s entourage can be found at the end of this article on page 3).
Grosskopf’s relationship with Takieddine began after he treated him for a serious head injury sustained in 2004. The neurosurgeon subsequently agreed to accompany the arms dealer on numerous trips to Libya, where he treated members of the Gaddafi family, and also elsewhere in the Arab world.
“Doctor Grosskopf followed Monsieur Takieddine everywhere during his trips,” Brisard told Mediapart, before his sudden decision to publicly distance himself from the illegal funding allegations. “He became the family doctor to all these Arab leaders, in Libya, Syria, the Arab Emirates. Whenever there was one who had a health complaint somewhere, he was sent. He treated everyone, Saif al-Islam...he knew the son and grandson of [late Saudi Crown Prince] Sultan, [and current Saudi Crown Prince, former interior minister] Nayef. I have a list. He accompanied him [Takieddine]. He was in his baggage. He heard lots of things.”
The first part of Brisard’s document of notes recording his conversation with Grosskopf is entitled 'CAMP07', referring to the 2007 French presidential election campaign. In a reference to Nicolas Sarkozy and Brice Hortefeux by their initials, and with abbreviations of words, it describes how the “campaign financing methods” of “NS” were “settled during the NS + BH Libya visit” the two men made on October 6th 2005. Sarkozy was then interior minister preparing to launch his long-planned presidential bid.
According to the notes in ‘CAMP07’, the Libyans were to offer “financing” of a total of 50 million euros through a covert system that involved a “BH” company based in Panama and an unidentified Swiss bank.
Contacted by Mediapart, Brice Hortefeux, (who is currently in charge of the president’s re-election campaign ‘rapid reaction’ team set up to present swift counter arguments to rival candidates), confirmed his presence in Libya alongside Sarkozy during the October 6th 2005 trip, but denied that any discussions were held with the Tripoli regime concerning the financing of Sarkozy’s 2007 election campaign. “There was never any question of political financing, neither near nor far,” he said, and denied any knowledge of the Panama-based company.
“Hortefeux is cited in the scheme plan,” Brisard told Mediapart. “He is, in fact, the front [man]. It was he who in all likelihood was the consignee of the funds.”
Enlargement : Illustration 2
In Brisard’s report of his conversations with Grosskopf, Takieddine is described as “in charge of the mounting” of the operation, in parallel to his “interventions” in a commercial deal between France and Libya for the sale to the Tripoli regime of a secure encrypted communications system, and a plant to manufacture identity cards embedded with electronic chips.
Recalling his conversations with Dr. Grosskopf, Brisard told Mediapart: “He cited to me two contracts in which retro-commissions served for that,” said Brisard. “It is ultra sensitive. I have a file. There are precise amounts, names, countries and dates.”
In Brisard’s report, ‘GEN/ NS V. MEMO DG’, it also notes that Grosskopf treated Gaddafi’s son Saif al-Islam. It also refers to the misadventures of Takieddine’s arms-dealing colleague Abdul Rahman El Assir, who is described as the object of an assassination attempt, referred to as an ‘OP HOMO’, in the exclusive Swiss mountain resort of Gstaad, where El Assir was domiciled. The related extract reproduced immediately below is exactly copied from the original textual presentation of the report.
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DIVERS
AR AL ASSIR TENTAT OP HOMO GSTAAD
INTERM FR NORMAND CHARS LECLERC AGRESSION (SOIGNE HOPITAL WELLINGTON A LONDRES)
SOIGNE SAIF AL ISLAM, ET AUTRES DIGNITAIRES LIBAN, AS, LIBYE, SYRIE
ACCOMP ZT / SERT DE FAIRE VALOIR
MEDECIN PERSO DES INTERLOCUTEURS DE ZT
AVANCE ARG (JET…) PR ZT (CB) PAS REMBOURSE
PROMESSES FIN DE ZT NON RESPECTEES.
DG : PROJET CREER UNE SOCIETE OFF SHORE (PB FISCAUX ET ORDRE)
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The relationship between Takieddine and Grosskopf ended in the autumn of 2006, when Takieddine lodged a complaint against the neurosurgeon with the Conseil de l’Ordre des Médecins, the French doctors’ regulatory body, to obtain reimbursement of what the arms dealer considered unduly high medical fees.
According to Brisard, it was after that that Grosskopf told him “I want to spill everything because he’s attacking me”.
Contacted by Mediapart, Grosskopf confirmed the meeting with Brisard, but declined to comment further on Brisard’s notes of their conversation. "Monsieur Brisard is a friend, I spoke with him several times about this subject, he helped me," Grosskopf said.
"But what he puts forward is his responsibility,” he added. “I do not want to be involved in this affair. I want to protect my interests, that is, my wife and my children. At one point I was followed. I was very frightened."
It was at a meeting in the Swiss town of Lausanne in December 2006 that Grosskopf confided his knowledge of the alleged funding scam to Brisard, whose report ‘GEN/ NS V. MEMO DG’ is a series of sub-notes recording the information offererd by the neurosurgeon.
The information Grosskopf gave Brisard about the October 2005 negotiations in Libya is partially supported by Ziad Takieddine’s personal notes (see here) addressed to Sarkozy’s then-principal private secretary, Claude Guéant (2), the current French interior minister.
These were last year handed over by Takieddine’s British former wife, Nicola Johnson, to judges Van Ruymbeke and Le Loire, the magistrates leading the ongoing investigation into the suspected illegal funding of Edouard Balladur’s 1995 presidential election campaign.
Jean-Charles Brisard began his professional career as a junior member of the Balladur government’s military affairs department and went on to lead the ‘youth branch’ of Balladur’s 1995 presidential election campaign. It was in connection with this that in October 2011, Brisard was summoned as a witness in the investigation into the funding of Balladur’s campaign.
He gave investigators several documents which he had prepared as summaries on matters related to the case (an extract from the list he gave the investigation is recopied immediately below). Among these was a reference to, although not the contents of, his report ‘GEN/ NS V. MEMO DG’, which Mediapart has obtained access to. But there were others as featured below, including one entitled ‘Handing over of cash for the campaign by Brice Horetefeux’.
Enlargement : Illustration 3
Brisard told Mediapart that the person who witnessed Hortefeux giving cash to Balladur’s campaign team “was someone who was in the youth branch and who was present at that”.
“Hortefeux gave cash to certain people for action supporting the campaign, dealings,” he added.
Also among the list of documents Brisard gave investigators last year were four reports entitled ‘EPOC’, which was in fact a reverse spelling of the last name of Jean-François Copé, a former budget minister under Jacques Chirac and now head of President Sarkozy’s ruling UMP party. Mediapart has previously published documented investigations illustrating the close ties, since the early 2000s, between, Copé and Ziad Takieddine.
One of these four reports describes how, in July 2005, when Copé was budget minister, his sister Isabelle Copé opened an account in Switzerland with the Crédit Suisse bank (see document below). Copé and his sister are currently joint partners in a French lawyers’ practice.
Enlargement : Illustration 4
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1: Nicolas Sarkozy was French interior minister, under then-President Jacques Chirac, from May 7th 2002 until March 30th 2004. He became finance minister from March 31st 2004 until November 29th 2004, again under President Chirac. He was re-appointed interior minister, still under the presidency of Jacques Chirac, from June 2nd 2005, until March 26th 2007. Nicolas Sarkozy was elected president of France in 2007 and took up his functions on May 16th 2007.
2: Claude Guéant was principal private secretary to interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy from 2002 to 2004, and occupied the same post when Sarkozy became finance minister between March and November 2004, and again when Sarkozy was re-appointed as interior minister between June 2005 and March 2007. Guéant became secretary-general of the Elysée Palace, equivalent to chief-of-staff of the French presidency, after Nicolas Sarkozy's election as French President in May 2007. On February 27th 2011, Guéant was appointed as Minister of the Interior, succeeding Brice Hortefeux.
From 'something soft' to 'crude manipulation'
Brisard, like Dr Grosskopf, is himself a friend of the Copé family. He personally helped Isabelle Copé open the account in Switzerland. “The police already had information about the account,” Brisard told Mediapart. “We had an exchange about it. They told me ‘we have seen your name in a banking case’. I said ‘wouldn’t that be an account opened in the name of Isabelle Copé?’ It was me who had the contact with the bank. I was a resident in Switzerland and client of the bank. I took contact with the banker. I took them [Isabelle Copé and her husband] by car. I wasn’t there when they opened the account, I had the decency to wait outside. I was not in the room with them. From what the sister told me, they opened it with 15,000 euros and two years later, they withdrew it.”
According to a report in French weekly Le Journal du Dimanche, Brisard gave a statement in October 2011 to police investigators from the national financial investigation division, the DNIF, working under Judge Van Ruymbeke, in which he said Isabelle Copé and her husband had told him “that her account was in fact for Jean-François Copé, and which would be used by him as a passing account.”
Interviewed by Paris Match magazine shortly after, Brisard denied the information published in the Journal du Dimanche, and accused the DNIF officers of mounting a “crude manipulation”.
He used the same phrase against Mediapart in the text of correspondence received on Friday March 16th in which he distances himself from the allegations of Gaddafi’s funding of Nicolas Sarkozy’s 2007 election campaign.
Beginning on October 26th 2011, Mediapart has met with Brisard on several occasions, as recorded in an exchange of email and SMS correspondence. In a conversation on Thursday March 15th, following the initial revelations of the allegations contained in his report published by Mediapart on March 12th, Brisard said: “It’s a bit complicated for me. I ask myself whether we couldn’t do something so that I step aside from this publication. I had in mind to do something soft, two lines saying ‘Monsieur Jean-Charles Brisard condemns or deplores the publication of a verbatim [account] containing information of a private nature, and also the publication of a document that is not authentic, nor the copy of an authentic document’.”
“I am the author of the document but the document that is in the article is not an authentic document. It is a reproduction,” he added.
The following day, March 16th, Mediapart received a letter from Brisard in which he employs strong and defamatory language against Mediapart and its reporters Fabrice Arfi and Karl Laske. It does not meet the legal requirements concerning the right of reply as laid down in Article 13 of the French law regulating freedom of the press. However, we have decided to publish it as an element of information.
The text of Brisard’s letter was as follows:
“Less than two months before the presidential election, Messrs Arfi and Laske pretend to offer your readers so-called “explosive” revelations about the financing by Libya of the 2007 presidential campaign, an enterprise in which they deliberately chose to associate me, in spite of me and without my knowledge (the interview that I accepted to give them was even illegally recorded) by publishing a crude montage established from my personal notes so as to make believe that they were, on the one hand, in possession of the authentic document and, on the other hand, and above all, that the elements contained in this document constituted proof of what they advanced.”
“As they themselves underlined, I have indeed for many years been in charge of several investigations, notably in the field of international terrorism, and in that capacity I daily receive numerous accounts, declarations, confidential information, sometimes even fabrications or fantasies from people from all around the world…information which, however sensational, does not have an pertinent value in itself as long as it has not been the object of a worthy investigation.”
“Today, I can only observe that Messrs Arfi and Laske are involved in a crude manipulation of a document – which is completely fabricated – in order to misrepresent the nature and value of elements extracted from my personal notes, and this for purely political and malicious reasons at the height of an electoral period.”
“Despite the illegal procedures used by these journalists to try and trap me, I can give the assurance that the elements of these notes cannot, in any form, credit the purely defamatory and false allegations that are contained in this article which engages only the responsibility of those who chose to publish it.”
“Also, I condemn the use of my name, my situation and my reputation in order to insinuate that I could have investigated such elements and attempted to bring any credit to this recurrent idea that, in the absence of any proof, is a pure journalistic fabrication.”
“These deplorable and dishonest methods lead me to entrust my legal counsel with engaging the judicial procedures necessary to protect my rights.”
Mediapart maintains the veracity of all of its reporting on the subject, and will be happy to respond to any eventual legal procedure by Jean-Charles Brisard as alluded to in his correspondence.
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English version: Graham Tearse