After a week of startling developments, the French presidency was this weekend engulfed by yet more revelations over the illegal political party funding scandal dubbed as Karachi-gate, involving secret cash payments siphoned off from French weapons sales abroad, notably to Pakistan, which implicates both the French president and his close political entourage. Two of Nicolas Sarkozy's longstanding political servitors, Nicolas Bazire and Thierry Gaubert, are now under official investigation over their alleged role in the affair, which includes the transport to Paris of suitcases stuffed with cash from a Swiss bank vault.
Meanwhile, presidential advisor Brice Hortefeux, one of Sarkozy's closest friends, has been caught by phone taps informing Gaubert, while he was in police custody, of damaging statements made by his estranged wife, Princess Hélène of Yugoslavia.
In this report on the latest developments in the case, Mediapart exclusively reveals excerpts of what Gaubert told the police, along with the official transcript of a phone conversation in which his daughter speaks of Sarkozy, Hortefeux and other senior officials as being "in the shit". Fabrice Arfi and Karl Laske report.
-------------------------
"The one thing that frightens me," Thierry Gaubert told police during questioning on September 20th, "it's the accounts abroad. I have nothing to do with the rest."
Gaubert, one of the French president's intimate inner circle of friends, who notably served as communications director for Nicolas Sarkozy when he was mayor of the town of Neuilly-sur-Seine, near Paris, and later as an advisor to Sarkozy when he was budget minister, was answering questions about why he put pressure on his estranged wife, Princess Hélène of Yugoslavia, to give a false statement in an ongoing judicial investigation into suspected illegal political party funding from French weapons sales abroad.
Gaubert, 60, and Nicolas Bazire, 54, Managing Director of French luxury goods group LVMH, who was Sarkozy's best man for his marriage to Carla Bruni in 2008, are both longtime friends and aides to French President Nicolas Sarkozy. They were this month placed under official investigation - a status one step short of being charged - for "aiding and abetting the misuse of company assets" over their roles in the suspected funding scam connected to French sales of submarines to Pakistan and frigates to Saudi Arabia.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
But the implications of the evidence emerging from the independent investigation led by Paris-based magistrate Judge Renaud Van Ruymbeke goes further than the two weapons deals concluded in the mid-1990s. Also placed under official investigation this month for "aiding and abetting the misuse of company assets" and "receiving" the proceeds was Franco-Lebanese arms dealer Ziad Takieddine, a key intermediary in both deals, and who Mediapart has revealed continued to play a central role in several weapons sales mounted by Nicolas Sarkozy's senior aides during the past decade (see links to Mediapart's investigations on page three).
In the transcript of a phone conversation held by Gaubert's daughter Nastasia, recorded by police and exclusively detailed further below in this article, she told a friend that "My father, he said to my mother: no-one will help me. Because everyone is in the shit", naming those concerned as the French President, his official advisor Brice Hortefeux and the head of France's ruling UMP party, Jean-François Copé.
Van Ruymbeke's investigation centres upon suspected illegal party funding sourced from bribes, officially described as commissions, paid by state naval armaments company DCN to secure the sale to Pakistan of three French Agosta-class submarines in 1994, and three La Fayette-class frigates to Saudi Arabia at the end of the same year.
The commissions, amounting to the equivalent of tens of millions of euros, were largely paid to Pakistani officials, but Van Ruymbeke has evidence that significant sums of money secretly returned to France, in a system known as retro-commissions, to fund the political activities of former French Prime Minister Edouard Balladur.
Material and verbal evidence suggests that the retro-commissions were used to fund Balladur's failed 1995 presidential election campaign. Bazire was Prime Minister Balladur's principal private secretary and became his presidential campaign director. Nicolas Sarkozy, Balladur's budget minister from 1993 to 1995, was his campaign spokesman and authorized the system set up for payment of the commissions.
Takieddine and Gaubert, whose 1988 marriage to Princess Hélène was celebrated by Sarkozy when he was Mayor of Neuilly, have been accused by both Takieddine's estranged British wife, Nicolas Johnson, and Gaubert's estranged wife Hélène, of making several trips to Geneva to transport back to Paris, via London, suitcases stashed with cash from a Swiss bank safe. Hélène has told police investigators from the National Financial Investigation Division, (DNIF), working under Van Ruymbeke, that the money was handed over in person to Bazire.
According to witness statements obtained by Mediapart, Hélène Gaubert gave police officers from the DNIF a sound recording of threats she said were made against her by her husband. During questioning of Thierry Gaubert on September 20th, a DNIF officer notified him: "We have a sound recording in which it appears that you have tried to influence a witness, [namely] your wife. This recording made by your wife has been transcribed."
Gaubert replied: "There is no threat. It is a discussion. I regret the words exchanged in irritation."
In the recording made by his wife, Gaubert can be heard demanding that she takes responsibility for a bank account opened in her name in the Bahamas, and which he allegedly used for his own purposes. The existence of the account was discovered by police officers from the DNIF during a search of Gaubert's Paris home on July 5th.
"My wife, in a general manner, I have always been good with her," Gaubert told police. "I have always looked after her. It is she who left me. When I learnt of her statements via the press, I told her that if I went under, she would go under with me and that I didn't see any interest for her to do that."
One of the police officers asked Gaubert: "Have you given instructions to your wife so that she doesn't tell us the truth during questioning?" Gaubert answered: "No, I told her don't talk rubbish. »
The officer then asks Gaubert: "She made clear to us that you had indicated to her the replies to give us. Do you confirm this?"
Gaubert: "No. I didn't know the questions you were going to ask her. But the conversation with her must have lasted four minutes."
The police officer then told Gaubert what his wife claimed she was told by him to say: "She was notably supposed to say that for the account opened in Switzerland, the money came from her grandmother, and that she had indicated the beneficiaries as her husband and her children. For the house in Colombia, she was to say that there was only a small plot of land and a small house. Do you confirm this?"
Gaubert replied: "No. That's to say, for the account in Switzerland, she has all her family in Switzerland, it was a means of finding a strategy and I even wonder whether there was money of hers in the account. As for the house in Colombia, indeed, I told her not to say that it was a large house."
Gaubert's answer thus confirmed that he had hoped to influence the statement given by his wife.
‘Everyone is in the shit’
The pressure Gaubert put on his wife followed the discovery in July, during the police search of his Paris home, of the existence of the account in the Bahamas. That much is confirmed by the conversations recorded during phone taps of Gaubert's mobile phone, ordered by an examining magistrate earlier this year, extracts of which were published by French daily Le Monde on September 23rd.
On July 19th this year, Gaubert's 20 year-old daughter Nastasia was recorded holding a conversation on her father's mobile phone with one of her friends, during which she said the police search of Gaubert's Paris home, earlier that month, had caused a clash between her parents. Gaubert, according to his daughter, was worried that the events would compromise President Nicolas Sarkozy, his ruling UMP party chief Jean-François Copé and Sarkozy's longstanding friend, former interior minister and current presidential advisor, Brice Hortefeux.
"In fact, they've found an account in the Bahamas and, er, my father put it in the name of my mother [...]. So there you are. He said to my mother, if you crack, er, all the family goes up in smoke. All of us go up in smoke," she is recorded as saying.
The young woman expressed her frustration that no-one could help her father. "Because Copé is too much in the shit. Hortefeux is too much in the shit. And if Sarko [Sarkozy] doesn't win the [2012 presidential election] second round, er, he too is in the shit and no-one helps him. My father, he said to my mother: no-one will help me. Because everyone is in the shit."
Nastasia Gaubert then spoke of the false witness statement her father asked her mother to give if ever she was questioned by police.
"My father told her, they're going to keep you [under questioning] for two days, that's certain. And they turn your brain upside down. Really. They turn your brain upside down, until you crack up. And there, he told her, if you crack up we all go up in smoke. He said to her, I'm going to tell you exactly what you are going to tell them [...] My father was livid."
She said her mother protested to him "I had told you not to get up to your stupidities." Nastasia also referred to bank accounts that the police search of her father's house had not revealed. "They found the one in the Bahamas, but then he's got one in Switzerland and one in Israel. But those they didn't find."
She spoke of her fears that her father would seek refuge abroad to escape prosecution. "If he wants to avoid prison, he takes off abroad, I think," she said. "That's all there is to do."
When she was questioned, Gaubert's wife Hélène gave police a detailed account of her husband's activities. She spoke of a transfer of funds in August 2001 from an account with the Pictet bank in Geneva that were sent into a newly-opened account in the Bahamas. The couple travelled to the Bahamas to finalise the operation, she said.
Questioned about this, Gaubert told police: "Pictet told me they were transferring their clients to the Bahamas. By coincidence, we were on holiday over there [in the Bahamas] and we made good of the occasion. At that time, we had transferred two or three million francs that we had placed [in investment accounts]. This had fructified to reach one million euros [...]".
Gaubert was then asked by a police officer: "Madame Nicola Johnson, former wife of Monsieur Takieddine, and Madame Hélène Gaubert have indicated that you and Monsieur Ziad Takieddine made frequent trips to Switzerland to go and get cash from the safe in the Safdié bank. Do you confirm this?"
Gaubert replied: "No, I don't know why they spoke of that."
The police officer continued: "Your wife has told us that you gave the cash collected in Switzerland from time to time to Monsieur Bazire, either when the latter came to dinner or by other means. Is this true, and if so, why? "
Gaubert replied: "That is totally false. I have never given money to Monsieur Bazire."
'Apparently Hélène is spilling a lot'
The taps of Thierry Gaubert's mobile phone have also revealed an extraordinary conversation he held this month with French presidential advisor Brice Hortefeux, while Gaubert was in police custody for questioning. The September 14th chat between the two men, revealed in transcript excerpts published by Le Monde this weekend, indicated that the French presidential offices were being immediately, and illegally, informed of the progress of Judge Van Ruymbeke's investigation.
Enlargement : Illustration 4
Hortefeux was formerly an interior minister under President Sarkozy, to whom he has been a close friend and political ally over a period of some 30 years. Beginning in a series of reports in July, Mediapart has revealed his close personal and professional links to arms dealer Ziad Takieddine, now a central suspect in the illegal political funding investigation.
In Hortefeux's call to Gaubert, he revealed that it was Gaubert's wife Hélène who gave a witness statement to which Mediapart had referred to, without naming her identity, in its report about the formal placing under investigation by Van Ruymbeke of arms dealer Ziad Takieddine (see English version here and the original article in French here). Mediapart had reported that the witness "recounted how Takieddine was accompanied during several visits to withdraw cash from a bank in Switzerland by Thierry Gaubert [...]The witness said the cash sums were transported in large suitcases by the two men back to Paris where they were handed over to Nicolas Bazire."
Hortefeux began his call on the subject of Takieddine being placed under investigation. The extracts revealed by Le Monde are as follows:
Gaubert: "Yeah"
Hortefeux: "Right, well you've seen what happened to him there, then?"
Gaubert: "Yes, yes."
Hortefeux: "Hum, he's been banned from leaving the country, huh?"
Gaubert: "Yes, yes."
Hortefeux: "[...] But I don't understand how he's being questioned over Karachi. I thought he had no role in Karachi, me."
Gaubert: "No, no, I think it's spread over other subjects, in my opinion, it's spread over the rest."
Hortefeux: "Right" [...] Apparently Hélène is spilling a lot."
Gaubert: "Yes but what information do you have on that, because to me she says she isn't saying anything?"
Hortefeux: "Yes, er, er, but it bothers me to tell you on the phone."
Gaubert: "Yeah, alright."
Hortefeux: "It seems that there are lots, lots of things."
[...]
Gaubert: "It comes from there, the witness who [is supposed to have] said things?"
Hortefeux: "Yes."
Gaubert: "It's rubbish. "
Hortefeux: "But have you been in touch with Bazire, because clearly, he's in it, in this business."
Gaubert: "Yes, yes, no, it's the lawyer who is supposed to have said [the incriminating account], it's not Hélène who would have spoken directly."
Hortefeux: "(sighs) Tut, she was questioned."
Gaubert: "Hélène?"
Hortefeux: "I believe so."
Gaubert: "Well, but that's not true, it's crazy that."
Hortefeux: "But Hélène, she knows, she was very, very aware of your activities."
Gaubert: "No, not at all."
Hortefeux: "That's why, it seemed bizarre."
Questioned later by the police about the September 14th conversation, Gaubert claimed: "I asked Monsieur Hortefeux for an explanation because I wanted to know what she [Hélène] said. I thought that, as former Minister of the Interior, he could have had some information. It's he who at the beginning spoke to me about Hélène's questioning." Gaubert added: "I told my daughter that it was from Brice Hortefeux that I had confirmation that the anonymous witness was my wife Hélène."
Late Friday, following the revelation of Hortefeux's conversation with Gaubert, the Paris public prosecutor's office announced the opening of an enquiry into suspected "violation of professional secrecy".
The move followed an outcry earlier in the day from the French opposition and magistrates' professional associations. Christophe Régnard, general secretary of the largest French magistrates' union, l'Union syndicale des magistrats, demanded that the public prosecutor's office "open a preliminary investigation into these leaks [to] the summit of the State."
-------------------------
For more on this story and Mediapart's exclusive investigations into the political scandal surrounding the activities of arms dealer Ziad Takieddine, click on the links below:
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
The well-connected arms dealer and his tax returns
How Sarkozy aides saved arms dealer from paradise island 'death blow'
Exclusive: how Sarkozy's team sought grace for Gaddafi's murderous henchman
The arms dealer and his Paris party for the glitterati
Exlusive: how President Sarkozy's team dealt with Gaddafi
When Total paid the bill for the Elysée's secret emissary
How French intelligence shields the sarkozy clan's unofficial emissary
Divorce court freezes arms broker's assets
The French-built stealth offroader that may be hiding Gaddafi
-------------------------
English version: Graham Tearse