A key suspect in the marathon judicial probe into alleged funding of former French president Nicolas Sarkozy’s 2007 election campaign by the Gaddafi regime in Libya was placed in preventive detention in France on Friday after losing a two-year legal battle to avoid his extradition from Britain.
Alexandre Djouhri, 60, a longstanding close associate of Sarkozy’s, who was first arrested at London’s Heathrow airport in January 2018 on a European warrant issued by France, arrived in Paris late on Thursday from London after losing his ultimate appeal against extradition.
He is suspected of being a central intermediary in the alleged funding of Sarkozy’s successful campaign by the regime of the late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, via the Libyan African Portfolio (LAP) sovereign wealth investment fund.
Nicolas Sarkozy has firmly denied any involvement in the alleged scam.
Djouhri was on Friday brought before the judges leading the judicial probe, when he was formally placed under investigation for nine alleged offences, including “active corruption”, aiding and abetting, and receiving, the proceeds of the “misappropriation of public funds”, “money laundering the proceeds of corruption”, “forgery and the use of forgeries” and “tax fraud”.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
Reportedly suffering from ill health, for which he received treatment in London, he was immediately detained in a prison hospital facility in Fresnes, close to Paris. Press reports this weekend, unconfirmed by his lawyer, said he had begun a hunger strike in protest over his arrest.
Under French law, a person can be placed under investigation – which is one step before charges may be brought, in which case they are sent for trial – if magistrates find “serious or concordant” evidence that they committed, or helped to commit, a crime. The long list of others placed under investigation in the judicial probe, which was launched almost seven years ago, include Nicolas Sarkozy , his former chief of staff Claude Guéant, the treasurer of Sarkozy’s 2007 campaign, Éric Woerth, and the Paris based French-Lebanese businessman and arms broker Ziad Takieddine.
The judicial probe was opened in April 2013, following a preliminary investigation by the public prosecution services which itself followed a series of revelations published by Mediapart of evidence suggesting the Libyan funding of the 2007 campaign. These detailed meetings and dealings with the Gaddafi regime by close aides to Sarkozy dating from 2005, as he was preparing, when a minister, his future bid for the presidency. But Mediapart’s reports notably revealed, in April 2012, an official Libyan document dated 2006 stating that the Gaddafi regime, which was toppled in 2011, approved payment of up to 50 million euros to back Sarkozy's campaign.
This was a letter signed by the then head of Libya's foreign intelligence agency, Moussa Koussa, and addressed to Gaddafi's chief of staff, Bashir Saleh, then president of the Libyan African Portfolio, one of the main investment arms of the regime, who was placed in charge of supervising the payments. Several expert analyses of the document, ordered by a judge after Sarkozy dismissed the document as “a crude forgery” and lodged a complaint against Mediapart for ‘forgery and use of forgery’, concluded the letter was genuine.
The wide-ranging Libyan funding affair could well be compared to a Russian doll, composed of a succession of dealings, events and relationships in which the suspicion of political financing is joined by evidence of personal gain. It involves a trail of several complex networks which for the most part involve the shadowy figures of rival middlemen Ziad Takieddine and Alexandre Djouhri, who both served Sarkozy’s inner circle.
Djouhri, who enjoys the soubriquet among some circles of “Monsieur Alexandre”, has both French and Algerian nationality. Born Ahmed Djouhri and raised by Algerian parents in a blue-collar Paris suburb, he rose, after early in his adult life being implicated in criminal violence, for which he was never charged, through the social ranks to hobnob with politicians including former French prime minister Dominique de Villepin, forging relationships with French business leaders and eventually becoming an intermediary in money-spinning deals, notably in Africa.
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At the current stage of the judicial investigation into the Libyan funding allegations, Djouhri is implicated in several key chapters of the affair.
One involves the purchase of a Parisian apartment by Claude Guéant, former chief of staff to Sarkozy both before and after he became president, and who was later appointed as interior minister in the final year of Sarkozy’s 2007-2012 term of office.
The apartment, situated close to the Arc de triomphe and the Champs-Élysées avenue in central Paris, was bought by Guéant in March 2008, three months after a state visit by Gaddafi to France following Sarkozy’s election. In 2013, during a search of Guéant's home by police from the OCLCIFF anti-corruption office, a bank slip was found showing that the purchase of the apartment was largely financed by a transfer, just days before it was concluded, of 500,000 euros into Guéant’s account with the French bank BNP.
According to Guéant’s statement to the judicial investigation, the money came from his sale of two small Dutch paintings to a lawyer in Malaysia. But the investigation has established that this was most improbable, given the two seascapes by 17th-century Flemish painter Andries van Eertvelt were in reality not worth more than 30,000 euros.
Tracfin, the economic tracking unit based at France's Economy and Finance Ministry, established that several days before transferring 500,000 euros to 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 officially noted that he “never varied in his declarations” – insisted that he did not know Guéant.
The transfer had in fact been made on the initiative of a former banker called Wahib Nacer, who is close to the Saudi family and who has control of several Bugshan accounts. Nacer also had business links with Gaddafi's former chief of staff Bashir Saleh, whose accounts he also managed.
Saleh and Djouhri enjoyed friendly relations, and became associates in 2008 in a dubious deal for both the sale and purchase of a villa in Mougins, near Cannes on the French Riviera; the villa was owned by Djouhri, via an offshore company, who sold the property to the Libyan African Portfolio (LAP) which Saleh was then the head of, for a grossly inflated price of 10 million euros. Its market value was 1.8 million euros.
The ongoing investigation suspects that the proceeds of the sale allowed Djouhri to repay back into the Saudi account the 500,000 euros sent out of it, via Malaysia, to Guéant, when the Saudi family was used as a screen.
Possible motives for Djouhri’s involvement in the suspected operation to gift Guéant – whose bank details were found by police in a search of Djouhri’s home – include help Guéant was allegedly to give him over the payment of commissions for the sale by aircraft manufacturer EADS (now called Airbus) of 12 Airbus aircraft to Libyan airline Afriqiyah Airways 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. Djouhri reportedly approached executives at EADS asking to receive what he claimed was owed.
One senior executive with the multinational aircraft manufacturer, Marwan Lahoud, told investigators that he had been approached by a “particularly threatening” Djouhri who claimed that the company should pay him 12 million euros in commission. Lahoud said that in 2009, Guéant, then chief of staff to Sarkozy at the Élysée Palace, asked him to honour Djouhri's due over the commissions linked to the Libyan aircraft. In a statement given to the judicial investigation, Lahoud said that while he regularly met Guéant to discuss EADS business strategy this had been, “from memory the only time that Guéant had talked to me about an engagement concerning an agent”.
Another senior management figure at EADS also alleged that Guéant approached the company to help Djouhri receive the commission payments.
Meanwhile, the investigation has also found that Guéant also became involved in helping Djouhri with a tax debt concerning the villa in Mougins. On two occasions, in October 2008 and March 2009, Alexandre Djouhri sent faxes to Guéant about a tax demand of 1.5 million euros relating to the property. The investigation has found a letter sent by an official working for then budget minister Éric Woerth who subsequently noted that the tax debt over 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 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 revelation by Mediapart of the Gaddafi regime document authorising Saleh, as head of the LAP to supervise funding of Sarkoy’s 2007 election campaign, Djouhri and Bernard Squarcini, then head of the French domestic intelligence agency, the DCRI, organised Saleh’s discreet exit from France where he had been living following the toppling and killing of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.
The events occurred just weeks away from the final round of the French presidential elections, when Sarkozy would eventually lose his bid for re-election in a hard-fought campaign against socialist rival François Hollande. Guéant was at the time interior minister, and Saleh, wanted by the new Libyan authorities, was staying in France under protection of the authorities despite being the object of an international “Red Notice” issued by Interpol for his arrest.
The investigation has obtained proof that it was Alexandre Djouhri who ordered the private jet on which Saleh left France, 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 Nacer's offices. “I am not aware of Djouhri's involvement in this extraction [of Saleh],” Nacer would tell the investigation in February 2019.
When he was questioned in police custody in March 2018 by magistrates leading the judicial investigation, and after which he was placed under investigation for “illicit funding of an electoral campaign”, “receiving and embezzling public funds” from Libya, and “passive corruption”, Nicolas Sarkozy denied any involvement in Saleh’s flight from France.
As previously reported by Mediapart, which obtained extracts of the exchanges, Sarkozy was questioned by one of the magistrates who told him: “It appears difficult to conceive that the Minister of the Interior and the head of intelligence could have organised, between the two rounds of the presidential elections in 2012, the exfiltration from French territory of Bashir Saleh, a former chief of staff to Gaddafi, without you having known about it, at the very moment when you proclaimed in the media that he would be arrested if he was discovered in France […] We remind you that he is supposed to have left with the help of the authorities, while you were head of state.”
“Which authorities?” Sarkozy replied. “Not mine. To my knowledge, Mr Djouhri was not a part of the authorities. And has someone said that I demanded or authorised this exfiltration? Of course not.”
According to the archived records of the Élysée Palace, between 2007 and 2011 Djouhri visited Guéant (who during that period was Élysée secretary general) on 59 occasions, when he also held 14 personal meetings with Sarkozy.
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- The original French report on which this English version is based can be found here.