The trial of Nicolas Sarkozy, the first case in which a former French president has been tried for corruption, has finally got under way in Paris. But so far the reality of the court proceedings has not matched up to the lofty issues that are at stake.
Is this because the three men on trial are a former head of state, his old friend and lawyer – who also happens to be a close friend of the current minister of justice – and a retired senior judge? Or because it is heavyweights at the Paris bar – who remain appalled that prosecutors tapped their phones to find who was leaking confidential information – are handling their defence? Is it because a full-on counter-offensive against the financial prosecutors from the Parquet National Financier (PNF) who ordered those phone taps was launched some months ago? Or that the presiding judge, Christine Mée, sometimes seems excessively cautious and occasionally finds it hard to command respect?
Whatever the reason, the trial of Nicolas Sarkozy, his lawyer Thierry Herzog and former senior magistrate Gilbert Azibert in the 32nd criminal chamber of the Paris courtrooms has yet to take off. After three sessions devoted to procedural matters, then a sleep-inducing presentation of the case by the presiding judge, followed by a lethargic questioning of the first witness (the former appeal court magistrate Patrick Sassoust who discreetly used the informal 'tu' form of address to his old colleague Gilbert Azibert), it was hoped that the trial would finally come to life on Wednesday December 2nd, the fifth day of the trial. But those hopes were dashed.
The day was devoted to the cross-examination of Gilbert Azibert. This retired senior magistrate has an extensive network of contacts, and forged his career under successive right-wing administrations. He occupied a string of important posts, including as head of the prison service the Administration Pénitentiaire, running the judicial training school the École nationale de la magistrature, state prosecutor at the court of appeal in Bordeaux and then secretary general at the Ministry of Justice when Sarkozy's justice minister Rachida Dati was in charge.
According to the investigating judges who sent Azibert for trial, this senior magistrate went well beyond his brief and did all he could to inform Nicolas Sarkozy – via the latter's friend and lawyer Thierry Herzog – to find out what was happening with the former president's official diaries. These had been seized as part of the sprawling Bettencourt affair. The diaries had then attracted the interest of judges investigating a separate case, the so-called Tapie affair involving businessman Bernard Tapie, and the former president wanted them returned to him at all costs. This was in 2013 when Gilbert Azibert was an advocate general at the top appeal court the Cour de Cassation and was hankering after a long, comfortable end-of-career post in the sunshine as a judge in Monaco.
Phone taps carried out by detectives showed that in return for the senior magistrate's help, Thierry Herzog asked Nicolas Sarkozy to pull some strings in Monaco. And that the former head of state agreed to intervene, verbally at least.
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Testifying, Gilbert Azibert said he wanted to make a declaration before being questioned. His throat tight with emotion, the senior magistrate complained bitterly about having been held in custody in the case, of having to have spent a night in a cell, the problems he had sleeping there, of taking his medication, of having a shower and of shaving. He also complained about the wait at the offices of the judges investigating the case. For someone who had spent forty years as a lawyer and magistrate, and given his background, Azibert's complaints were astonishing.
Presiding judge Christine Mée allowed him to describe – at length – how the Cour de Cassation worked. “What interests us is the issue of law, not the case,” insisted Gilbert Azibert, to justify his curiosity over Sarkozy's presidential diaries. “The Bettencourt affair captivated the whole of France, and you don't think that magistrates at the Cour de Cassation take an interest in it?” he asked the court.
In fact on several occasions Azibert, who dealt with civil cases at the Cour de Cassation, asked his colleagues about the progress of criminal cases that interested him personally and in particular that involved his connections. As well as Thierry Herrzog, another friend of Gilbert Azibert, Professor Christian Doutremepuich, the head of a forensic laboratory at Bordeaux in south-west France, also seemed to need help over a case that had gone to the Cour de Cassation. According to the phone taps, Gilbert Azibert sought to thwart one of his colleagues who was unfavourable to Christian Doutremepuich's case. “An idiot,” Azibert said in a conversation with his friend and fellow senior magistrate Patrick Sassoust. “He's not being asked to change his mind … just take his foot off the pedal, at most.”
When questioned about his seemingly self-serving links with judges and lawyers in charge of sensitive cases, and about private lunches and dinners, Gilbert Azibert justified them by refererence to his love of the law. This was also the only reason why he went to Thierry Herzog's legal practice to obtain a judgement from the court of appeal in Bordeaux over the Bettencourt affair. “The case interested me, yes, over the legal issue of the president of the Republic's diaries, whoever the president was,” Azibert told the court. “There's a serious constitutional issue here that has never been determined.”
His old impulses took over and Gilbert Azibert felt it useful to give the court his views about the seizure of Nicolas Sarkozy's presidential diaries, which had been placed under seal by judges in Bordeaux who were investigating the Bettencourt affair. “In my opinion there was a violation of the separation of powers,” he asserted. Nonetheless, he was not Nicolas Sarkozy's hidden legal adviser, Azibert insisted. The proof, he said, was that when he spoke with Thierry Herzog, it was also to discuss criminal procedure - though the telephone taps tend to suggest the opposite.
When confronted with evidence that he sought to get information from several colleagues about the case involving Sarkozy's diaries, or even to influence other magistrates at the Cour de Cassation, Gilbert Azibert said he was “shocked”. He told the court: “I have never contacted legal counsel or a rapporteur.” Implying that others, however, did gather information, he said: “I am here before you, and I'm the only one!” When questions irritated him, the former magistrate lost his temper. “We're not in the Stasi,” he said on one occasion, in reference to the secret police in the former East Germany. “It's the Fifth Column!” he said on another occasion.
To believe Gilbert Azibert's version of events he simply exaggerated the extent of his influence in his telephone conversations, while his friend Thierry Herzog had sought reassure his client and friend Nicolas Sarkozy over the diaries case. The presiding judge let this comment go.
Gilbert Azibert is now trying to show that he did not need Nicolas Sarkozy to pull strings to get him a job in Monaco, as he was no longer really a candidate following a health problem. Yet the phone taps indicate that Thierry Herzog did ask for help from Nicolas Sarkozy, who told him that he had intervened, and that Gilbert Azibert had been informed of this.
It was then the turn of lawyers from the financial prosecution unit the Parquet National Financier (PNF) to question Gilbert Azibert. The defence lawyers objected to a question asked about a dinner he had had with Pierre Haïk, a former lawyer for Nicolas Sarkozy, who was no longer practising for health reasons. Taking the view that all telephone taps between a lawyer (Thierry Herzog) and his client (Nicolas Sarkozy) should not feature in the case, the defence lawyers were scandalised that a lawyer could be presented as a potential suspect in this way.
The arguments of the PNF lawyers, who are prosecuting the case, were interrupted. There was then an incident involving a lawyer, Frédérik Canoy, who was for somewhat hazy reasons intending to represent any civil plaintiffs in the case, having earlier said he represented the real Paul Bismuth. This was the name that Thierry Herzog advised Nicolas Sarkozy to use to register his prepaid phone under to avoid detection if their phones were being tapped. After some lively and confusing arguments, during which some lawyers seemed ready to come to blows, the hearing was suspended until the following day.
At one point in the hearing, when the lawyers were talking about the right not to answer questions about telephone conversations with their clients, which they said was covered by an absolute duty of professional confidentiality, Nicolas Sarkozy got up from his seat. “I will explain myself and answer all questions,” the former president told the court. In between hearings, and followed closely by his public relations team, Nicolas Sarkozy regularly went over to the press area to repeat to journalists his strong desire to see the truth finally come out. That was after having exhausted all his legal attempts to avoid a trial in the first place.
Nicolas Sarkozy, Thierry Herzog and Gilbert Azibert are all charged with corruption and influence peddling. Herzog and Azibert are also charged with breaching professional confidentiality. All three deny the charges.
The trial continues.
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- The original French version of this report can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter