Businessman Alexandre Djouhri, who is currently living in London, is one of the few central figures in the probe into financial links between former-president Nicolas Sarkozy's inner circle and Muammar Gaddafi's Libyan regime not to have been interviewed by judges investigating the affair. That could change soon as Djouhri is now fighting extradition from the British capital.
The Libyan affair resembles a Russian doll, with different layers and sections which ultimately come together to form the outline of one major suspicion: that of systematic, compromising behaviour by a political group in France (the Sarkozy clan) with a foreign dictatorship (Muammar Gaddafi's Libya).
Enlargement : Illustration 1
In this wide-ranging case, where suspicions of political financing mix with suggestions of personal gain, the judicial investigation launched in 2013 has the formidable task of following the trail of several complex networks. For the most part these networks involve two shadowy figures, described somewhat coyly as “middlemen”, who happen to hate each other even though they have served the same political clan. Their names are Ziad Takieddine and Alexandre Djouhri.
The latest developments in the investigation, which Mediapart has gained knowledge of, show the extent to which police and judges have made progress in their probe into Alexandre Djouhri. The French judges want to question him over a long list of alleged offences: “active corruption”, “forgery and use of false instruments”, “complicity in embezzling public funds”, “receiving and laundering embezzled public funds” and “laundering the proceeds of tax fraud”.
Among the recent evidence that has been documented by the financial section of the Paris courthouse – which is overseeing the independent judge-led investigation - is the transcript of Judge Serge Tournaire's questioning of a former banker called Wahib Nacer. This key figure in Djouhri's network was interviewed by the French judge on February 19th 2019 in Djibouti in East Africa.
Initially the target of an arrest warrant, Wahib Nacer has now been placed under formal investigation for “complicity in active and passive corruption”, “organised laundering of the proceedings corruption”, “organised laundering of the proceeds of tax fraud”, “complicity in the embezzling of public funds” and “receiving”.
During the course of the 36-page transcript of the judge's questions and the answers given by Wahib Nacer – who comes across at times as embarrassed and sometimes incoherent in his responses – the outline of any potential criminal proceedings against Alexandre Djouhri starts to emerge. However, whether any proceedings against Djouhri do ultimately take place initially depends on the English courts, who ordered the middleman's extradition to France, a decision against which he then appealed.
Born in the East African country of Djibouti in 1944, Wahib Nacer spent much of his career at the bank Indosuez, which in the middle of the 1990s was taken over by French bank Crédit Agricole. He worked for the bank in Geneva and was resident for many years in Switzerland, while owning a large amount of property in France. Wahib Nacer now lives back in his native country which is where Judge Tournaire questioned him and placed him under formal investigation – a status in French criminal law procedure which is one step short of charges being brought.
Wahib Nacer says he has known Alexandre Djouhri since the start of the 2000s. An investigation by detectives from the anti-corruption unit OCLCIFF and investigating judges has thrown up several “suspicious operations” in the pair's business affairs, and these now lie at the heart of the Libyan funding case.
These are those operations:
♦ Half a million euros for Claude Guéant, Nicolas Sarkozy's right-hand man
Back in 2013, this was the spark which lit the judicial fire. When, during a search of Claude Guéant's home, detectives found a bank slip showing that 500,000 euros had gone into his BNP bank account in March 2008, Nicolas Sarkozy's right-hand man gave investigators an explanation which, six years later, holds no water as far as the judges are concerned. Or, as the judges have put it in several documents, it is a “false explanation”.
Enlargement : Illustration 2
This large sum allowed Guéant, who was then secretary general of the Élysée Palace and Sarkozy's chief of staff, to purchase a fine apartment behind the Arc de Triomphe in Paris for 715,000 euros. Officially the money came from the sale of two small Dutch paintings to a lawyer in Malaysia.
The problem with this explanation is that these two seascapes by Flemish painter Andries van Eertvelt (1590-1652), bought for 500,000 euros, were in reality not worth more than 30,000 euros. The second problem is that the receipt produced by the purchaser lacks any authenticity as a document because of the number of errors it contains. These include serious spelling mistakes in the paintings' titles and painter's name, the fact that the currency symbol on the sale price was not in euros, that there was no solid identifying information given about the seller and so on.
So the money came from another source and, as far as the judicial investigation is concerned, that other source is Alexandre Djouhri. In hindsight, the convoluted journey undertaken by Claude Guéant's money reassembles a labyrinth on a global scale, a route which appears to have been designed to cover the traces of those who were involved.
Those efforts were in vain, however.
To begin with Tracfin, the economic tracking unit based at France's Economy and Finance Ministry, established that several days before transferring 500,000 euros to Claude Guéant, the lawyer in Malaysia – the supposed purchaser of the paintings – had received exactly the same sum from the bank account of a member of the billionaire Bugshan family from Saudi Arabia. Yet the family member supposedly involved, Khaled Bugshan - later questioned by French judges who said he “never varied in his declarations” - insisted that he did not know Guéant and had not been involved in any investments in Malaysia in 2008.
However, he said this transfer had been made at the request of Wahib Nacer, who is close to the Saudi family and who has control of several Bugshan accounts. Wahib Nacer also had business links with Gaddafi's chief of staff Bashir Saleh, a key Libyan figure who was close to Alexandre Djouhri.
When questioned in February 2019 over Bugshan's comments about the 500,000 euros paid to Guéant, Wahib Nacer gave what could be described as a supple response: “I didn't ask him, but I will not go as far as to say he is lying.”
Does this mean that someone else made the request for the payment? What is known is that a bank slip with details of the bank account in which Claude Guéant received the 500,000 euros was found during a search of Alexandre Djouhri's Swiss home. Questioned by the judges, Claude Guéant was unable to explain how or why a bank slip with his account details had been found at Djouhri's home. The judges were of the view that the latter was “clearly actively involved”.
In 2016 the Bugshan family started formal legal proceedings in Switzerland claiming they had been victims of an abuse of trust. That also seems to be the view of the French investigating judges who, in a formal request to the authorities in Djibouti in 2017 for assistance on a legal issue, wrote: “It would appear that Wahib Nacer abused his relationship of trust with Khaled Bugshan to use his Saudi account for a laundering operation, with the complicity of the Malaysian lawyer, seeking to discreetly send to Claude Guéant funds which are of indeterminate origin but which cannot correspond to the sale of the two paintings, and which are more like to be the quid pro quo for services rendered by Claude Guéant at a time when he occupied a central place in the machinery of the French state.”
However, during questioning by Judge Tournaire, in the course of which he often repeated phrases such as “I don't know”, “I know nothing about it” and “I have no observation to make”, Wahib Nacer insisted that he was not “manager of the [editor's note, Bugshan] accounts in the strict sense”. He told the judge: “I didn't have access to the computers nor to the passwords.”
Contacted by Mediapart, Claude Guéant said that he had already spoken to the judges and did not want to say any more about it “for the moment” but added: “I simply emphasise that the intellectual constructions that may have been devised don't correspond to the truth.” He is thus sticking to his initial version about the origin of the 500,000 euros. The last time he was questioned by judges, during which he was put under formal investigation for “corruption”, Guéant employed his right to silence 51 times.
♦ The inflated sale price of one of Djouhri's villas to a Libyan fund
On January 23rd 2008, two months after the 500,000 euros arrived in his personal bank account, Claude Guéant welcomed Gaddafi's chief of staff Bashir Saleh to his official Élysée office, accompanied by Alexandre Djouhri. The middleman himself visited Guéant 59 times at the Élysée between 2007 and 2011, and Sarkozy 14 times over the same period.
In that very same year, 2008, Djouhri and Saleh were at the heart of a financial set-up which, according to the investigating judges, enabled the middleman to sell a property at an exorbitant price to a Libyan sovereign fund managed by the Libyan official - who kept some of the money. The property in question, which was sold for 10 million euros when it was worth at most 'just' 1.8 million euros, was a villa that Djouhri had owned at Mougins near Cannes in the south of France since 1998.
As in the affair involving Guéant's 500,000 euros, the name of the Bugshan family cropped up and, once again, they formally denied any involvement in the operation. In broad terms the judges suspect Bashir Saleh and Alexandre Djouhri of having organised the overpriced sale of the Mougins villa to Libya – with the help of banker Wahib Nacer – using the Saudi family as a form of screen to avoid showing a direct sale by the middleman.
To obscure the details of the deal as much as possible, the sale took place via a company in Panama called Bedux Management Inc., whose official beneficiary was supposedly Khaled Bugshan – something he has categorically denied. In fact Wahib Nacer was unable to produce any written evidence or signature to Judge Tournaire proving that Bugshan was indeed the beneficiary of Bedux and therefore the recipient of the monies from the villa's sale. “We don't work like that,” was Wahib Nacer's only response.
The judges therefore believe that, once again, the Bugshan name may have been used to hide the true role of Alexandre Djouhri, who has himself denied any link with this deal in general and Bedux in particular. Alexandre Djouhri and his lawyer Francis Szpiner declined to respond to questions from Mediapart.
But though Alexandre Djouhri is careful to keep a low profile, on this occasion he did leave traces behind him. For example, when the initial sale contract for the villa was signed in May 2008 in Tripoli between Bedux – represented by Wahib Nacer – and Libya – represented by Bashir Saleh - the private jet that took Wahib Nacer between Geneva, Tripoli and Paris was paid for by Alexandre Djouhri. “I didn't know that the flight was funded by Alexandre Djouhri, and if that is the case, I don't know why he did that,” banker Wahib Nacer told the judge.
The investigation has also shown that in July 2008 more than 3 million euros was paid into a Bedux account opened at Crédit Agricole Suisse with the reference “AD”, Alexandre Djouhri's initials. “AD, that's a mystery to me,” said Wahib Nacer, at whose property the relevant bank documents were found. “When I wrote down AD, that could have been Alexandre Djouhri, or someone else,” he said, without explaining who that someone else might be.
Finally, the investigation has revealed that when Alexandre Djouhri asked Wahib Nacer to send him money, the funds were immediately taken out of a Bedux account. This suggests that Djouhri had the power to get monies transferred from this Panamanian front company with which he says he has no link.
Claude Guéant's name also crops up in this part of the Libyan affair. On two occasions, in October 2008 and March 2009, Alexandre Djouhri sent faxes to President Sarkozy's chief of staff about a tax bill of 1.5 million euros relating to the Mougins villa. The middleman's pleas were apparently heard. Later an official working for budget minister Éric Woerth wrote in a letter that the villa was “subject to an intervention by the minister's office” and that as a result recovery of the debt had to be “deferred”.
The investigators then made a crucial discovery. In March 2010 the Saudi account which was the origin of the 500,000 euros sent to Guéant received 500,000 euros of the Libyan money from Bedux's account. On the surface it looks like a compensatory payment after the event.
♦ Commissions on the sale of Airbus planes to Gaddafi
Is Claude Guéant suspected of using his position at the heart of the French state to help Alexandre Djouhri, over and above his possible intervention with the Finance Ministry over the middleman's property sale tax issues? Yes, according to the judicial investigation.
This alleged quid pro quo relates to the commission that the middleman claimed – and had claimed for a long time – over the sale by aircraft manufacturers EADS (now called Airbus) of 12 aircraft to Gaddafi's Libya in 2006.
According to a July 2010 memo written by the French domestic intelligence agency the DCRI - now the DGSI – Bashir Saleh had negotiated commissions with Djouhri over the Airbus deal. Moreover, when Djouhri discreetly opened a UBS bank account in Singapore in 2006, he told his bank adviser at the time that he was about to receive 2 million euros resulting from the sale of aircraft to the Libyan regime.
On several occasions Alexandre Djouhri approached executives at EADS asking to receive what he thought he was owed. One of the senior figures in the multinational aircraft manufacturer, Marwan Lahoud, confirmed to investigators that he had been approached by a “particularly threatening” Djouhri who claimed that the company should pay him not 2 million but 12 million euros in commission. Lahoud said that the words used by the middleman represented “quite a chilling threat, talking of physical violence which he would have carried out”. The EADS executive said that in 2009 Claude Guéant, who was then still President Sarkozy's right-hand man, asked him “very politely” to look at Alexandre Djouhri's situation over the commissions linked to the Libyan aircraft.
♦ When Gaddafi's former right-hand man fled France after Mediapart's revelations
The trio of Alexandre Djouhri, Claude Guéant and Bashir Saleh were omnipresent in all of the key periods of the Libyan funding affair.
On May 3rd 2012, five days after the revelations by Mediapart about the suspicions of Libyan funding of the Sarkozy clan, a state 'break-out' was organised to allow Bashir Saleh to leave France. The man who was the guardian of all of Gaddafi's secrets had been staying in France under the protection of the Sarkozy administration, despite the fact the Libyan was the object of an Interpol red notice to arrest him.
By that time Guéant had become Sarkozy's minister of the interior. And it was boss of the domestic intelligence agency the DCRI, Bernard Squarcini, who worked under the interior minister's direct authority, who - together with Alexandre Djouhri - made this extraordinary flight from France possible, as Mediapart has reported.
Detectives have since obtained proof that it was Alexandre Djouhri who ordered the private jet which allowed Saleh calmly to escape, first to Niger then South Africa. The flight, which cost 94,700 euros, was paid for by a lawyer from Djibouti who was the cousin and brother-in-law of Wahib Nacer.
All the bank documentation linked to this extraordinary episode in the Libyan affair was found in a search of Wahib Nacer's offices. “I am not aware of Djouhri's involvement in this extraction [of Saleh],” the banker told Judge Tournaire in February 2019.
When Nicolas Sarkozy was questioned in custody about the spectacular escape, he said he had not been aware of anything to do with the matter, including Bashir Saleh's presence on French soil. The detectives questioning the former president were taken aback by this. “Do you understand that we might wonder about the position of Mr Guéant, minister of the interior and Mr Squarcini's superior, taking account of his closeness to you, and in particular of the fact that he had not informed you or made you aware of Mr Saleh's flight at a time when that was making the front pages?”
Defending himself, Sarkozy had no hesitation in abandoning Guéant. “Claude Guéant was for years a remarkable employee, who carried out the tasks I gave him in a tireless, professional and loyal manner … Once he was nominated minister of the interior, he was no longer my employee … From then on he had his own political existence, his own operational room for manoeuvre as a minister,” said the former president.
The judges, too, revealed their incredulity at Nicolas Sarkozy's comments. “It seems difficult to conceive that the minister of the interior and the director of intelligence could organise the extraction of Gaddafi's former chief of staff, Bashir Saleh, from French territory, between the two rounds of the 2012 presidential election, without you knowing, at the very time when you were stating in the media that he would be arrested if he was discovered in France,” said the judges. “We remind you that he apparently left with the help of the authorities while you were head of state.”
Nicolas Sarkozy replied: “Which authorities? Not mine. To the best of my knowledge Mr Djouhri was not part of the authorities. And has someone said that I had requested or authorities this extraction? Of course not!”
The apparent role of Bashir Saleh in the Libyan funding affair is not just related to his relations with Alexandre Djouhri. Saleh is also named in the handwritten notes dating from 2007 made by the former Libyan prime minister Shukri Ghanem, in which he described Gaddafi's chief of staff as one of the key figures in the regime who had financed Nicolas Sarkozy's presidential campaign. Ghanem was found dead in the River Danube in Vienna in April 2012, in circumstances which still remain unclear.
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- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter