It has been a strange and difficult week for Claude Guéant the former interior minister, one-time chief of staff to President Nicolas Sarkozy and a key ally and friend of the latter for many years.
On Tuesday the weekly magazine Le Canard enchaîné revealed that during a search of his flat and law firm offices earlier this year, police officers had found documents relating to a money transfer on one of his bank accounts of more than 500,000 euros. Guéant immediately and publicly denied the suggestion that the money was Libyan cash used to finance Nicolas Sarkozy's successful 2007 election campaign. An independent judicial investigation into the suspected illegal funding of Sarkozy’s presidential campaign by the regime of the late Colonel Muammar Gaddafi was announced last month.
Instead the former minister claimed that the large sum came from the sale of two 17th century Dutch paintings of naval scenes. “These are possessions I bought 20 years ago,” he said. “I have all the receipts and have made them available to the court,” declared Guéant. "This money has absolutely nothing to do with any Libyan funding."
However, there was immediately a snag with Guéant's defence. For it soon became clear that paintings by the artist in question, Andries Van Eertvelt, have fetched much lower figures than the sums Guéant said he received for his two works. At the time that Guéant said he sold them – 2008 – to a Malaysian lawyer, another naval scene painted by the same artist fetched just €17,000 at auction in Munich.
And the company Artprice has stated that the average price of the type of paintings Gueant said he sold – oil paintings on wood measuring 30cm by 60cm – is “15,127 euros”. Meanwhile, a reader pointed out to Mediapart that a pair of Van Ertvelt paintings (see below) similar to the ones Guéant says he sold were put up for sale in 2008 but failed to find a buyer – the guide price was 150,000 to 200,000 euros for the two.
Indeed, the highest price yet paid for a Van Eertvelt was 168,750 euros at Sotheby's in May 2010. This means that Guéant sold the two paintings five years ago for well above the highest price that any of the artist's works has yet fetched on the open market. Guéant has stuck by his story about the sale of the paintings, though he has also admitted: “I struck a good deal.”
Then on Thursday a second problem emerged with Claude Guéant's paintings defence. Mediapart established that Guéant, who at the time of the sale was President Sarkozy's chief of staff, had not been given authorisation by the ministry of culture to sell the two works overseas, an authorisation that is however obligatory in law for any painting more than 50 years old and with a value of more than 150,000 euros.
In one phone conversation on Thursday Guéant indicated to Mediapart that he possessed the necessary “certificate” for the sale of the paintings overseas to the Malaysian lawyer. But in a second phone conversation, which took place after the ministry of culture confirmed that no request for authorisation for selling the paintings had been received, the former interior minister insisted he had never claimed to have the certificate. “I have said all that I have to say on the subject and I will reserve the rest for the judge,” he told Mediapart.
Cash bonuses
This all puts the former right-hand man of Nicolas Sarkozy in a delicate position. As La Tribune de l'art website puts it, the absence of any such certificate seriously undermines Guéant's public claims about the sale of the paintings. “It's one thing or the other: either the sale of these paintings is simply a fiction hiding a much more opaque source of funding, or he has been guilty of illegal exportation...a crime subject to two years imprisonment and a fine of 450,000 euros...” says the site. The one possible get-out for the former minister is if the paintings were indeed sold to a Malaysian lawyer but that they remained in France.
The paintings are not the only issue causing Guéant major embarrassment following his attempts to explain away payments found by the investigators who searched his affairs in February. He claimed earlier this week that invoices for which he had been paid in cash related to cash bonuses he had received when he worked as a senior civil servant from 2002 to 2004. These were known about and accepted by the tax authorities, he said. During this time he was chief of staff to Nicolas Sarkozy at the ministry of the interior.
However, the controversial system of undeclared cash bonuses to senior officials working in ministers' offices had been officially ended by a decree by the then prime minister Lionel Jospin in December 2001. Guéant's former ministerial colleague Roselyne Bachelot said this week it was “totally impossible” for Guéant to have received those payments – which he says amounted to 20,000 to 25,000 euros – in the way he described.
On Thursday the current interior minister Manuel Valls ordered an administrative inquiry into the cash bonus affair, insisting that there is no such system in place in his ministry now. The results of the investigation are due within a month.
Guéant has been named as an important figure in the alleged Libyan funding of the Sarkozy presidential campaign, an allegation both he and the former president strongly deny. A preliminary investigation into the claimed funding was prompted by the publication by Mediapart on April 28th 2012 of an article which revealed the existence of an official document written by a senior figure in Libya in 2006 referring to the Tripoli regime’s approval of the payment of 50 million euros to help finance Sarkozy's campaign
The document, which survived the bombing of Libya during the bloody overthrow of Colonel Gaddafi in 2011, was obtained by Mediapart in April 2012 from former high-ranking officials of the Gaddafi regime. It is signed by the then head of Libya's foreign intelligence agency, Moussa Koussa.
Dated December10th 2006, the letter says that the regime had agreed to “support the electoral campaign” of Nicolas Sarkozy for his 2007 bid, and for the “sum of fifty million euros”.
The letter also states that an agreement on “the amount and method of payment” had been reached at a meeting two months earlier involving Brice Hortefeux, a close friend and political ally of Nicolas Sarkozy, who was then minister for local government. The meeting was said to have been held in the presence of Franco-Lebanese arms dealer and businessman Ziad Takieddine, who in 2005 had introduced Sarkozy, then interior minister, and his chief of staff Guéant to Libyan regime insiders.
Gaddafi's chief-of-staff, Bashir Saleh, then president of the Libyan African Portfolio (LAP), one of the main investment arms of the regime, was in charge of supervising the payments. After the fall of the Gaddafi regime, Saleh set up in exile in France.
The decision last month to proceed with a judicial investigation into the suspected financing of his campaign by Gaddafi comes after a series of police raids between January 16th and April 11th on the homes and offices of Saleh, Guéant and Takieddine. The raids were carried out by the French police’s national financial and fiscal investigation squad (the Division nationale des investigations financières et fiscales) the Dniff.
It was during the searches of Guéant's home and offices in February that details of the payments causing the current row were unearthed.
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English version by Michael Streeter