For the third time in his life the former French president Nicolas Sarkozy, already convicted of corruption in the so-called Bismuth phonetapping case and found guilty at both first instance and on appeal for illegal campaign financing in the so-called Bygmalion affair, is set to enter a courtroom at Paris's Judicial Court to stand trial in a case involving dishonesty.
However, the trial over Libyan financing of his election campaign in 2007, which is due to begin this Monday, January 6th, at 1.30pm, will undoubtedly be the most intense judicial battle for him so far, as the accusation he faces is unique in French political and criminal history. The former head of state is suspected of having been party to a corruption pact, two years before the 2007 French presidential election which he won, with one of the most notorious dictatorships on the planet - Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya. This was a regime France would ultimately go to war against in 2011 during the Arab Spring.
Alongside the former president, the defendants' bench will also feature three former senior ministers (Claude Guéant, Brice Hortefeux, and Éric Woerth), a businessman and former close associate of Nicolas Sarkozy whohas been a familiar figure in courtrooms (Thierry Gaubert), two controversial middlemen (Ziad Takieddine and Alexandre Djouhri), a former Libyan official (Bashir Saleh), and an executive from the Airbus Group (Édouard Ullmo).
Enlargement : Illustration 1
In total, thirteen individuals have been sent to stand trial at the criminal court. Several are already certain to be absent from the proceedings, such as Colonel Gaddafi’s former chief of staff, Bashir Saleh, who has ignored all requests from the French justice system, and the alleged agent of corruption Ziad Takieddine, who remains on the run in Lebanon following his conviction and five-year prison sentence in the Karachi affair.
Nicolas Sarkozy will face charges on four counts: corruption, criminal conspiracy, receipt of the proceeds of the misappropriation of public funds, and illegal campaign financing. Like all the defendants, he denies the allegations and benefits from a presumption of innocence.
After ten years of investigation, initially led by Judge Serge Tournaire and later continued by his colleague Judge Aude Buresi, a 557-page summary report was signed on August 24th 2023. This document, an 'ordonnance de renvoi devant le tribunal correctionnel' (ORTC) in French, formally sets out the case for Sarkozy and his co-accused to stand trial. It relies on evidence uncovered during the investigation, analysis by prosecutors from the financial crimes prosecution unit, the Parquet National Financier (PNF), and the monumental work of detectives from the police anti-corruption unit, the Office Central de Lutte contre la Corruption et les Infractions Financières et Fiscales (OCLCIFF).
On page 447 of their report, the investigating judges get into their stride and produce a crucial – if lengthy - sentence that sums up what the investigation is about: “The manner in which Nicolas Sarkozy suddenly sought to rekindle ties with a regime as controversial as that of Colonel Gaddafi, while he was still only minister of the interior and not minister of foreign affairs and, even more so, the conditions under which this relationship evolved - with the omnipresence of a shadowy businessman well-versed in parallel negotiations around major import-export contracts, such as Ziad Takieddine, the repeated trips without obvious purpose undertaken by the future President of the Republic's closest associates, and the secret meetings arranged [on Libyan soil] - is very difficult to understand unless one considers that this activity was concealing a secret and that, in reality, it was about securing covert funding for the future campaign.”
And the judges are unequivocal: the investigations have “revealed both payments and reciprocal benefits”. This was on the one hand covert Libyan funding for the benefit of the French side. And on the other, French favours of all kinds - diplomatic, legal and economic – provided for Libya.
The French Republic and the terrorist
The investigators have identified two networks of alleged corruption. The first was run by intermediary Ziad Takieddine, and the second by his rival within Sarkozy’s team, Alexandre Djouhri. Despite their complicated backgrounds, both men had direct access to the highest political authorities in the country, much to the frustration of several senior civil servants and intelligence agents who were powerless witnesses to this dangerously close relationship.
The Takieddine network relied in Libya on a high-ranking official, Colonel Gaddafi’s brother-in-law and head of military intelligence, Abdullah al-Senussi. An infamous figure in France, Senussi was sentenced by a Paris court in 1999 to life imprisonment for terrorism. He was the orchestrator, on behalf of the Libyan regime, of the 1989 bombing of the French UTA DC-10 airliner, which claimed 170 lives.
One of the most significant episodes of the alleged corruption pact involving Sarkozy’s team can be summarised through five key dates, directly linked to Takieddine and Senussi:
- September 30th 2005: Claude Guéant, Nicolas Sarkozy's chief of staff at the Ministry of the Interior, travels to Libya. The trip is organised by Ziad Takieddine, who wants it to be of a “secretive nature” so that “the other important matter” can be broached, according to records authenticated by the investigation. During his visit, Claude Guéant has a secret meeting in Tripoli with Abdallah Senussi, who is wanted by France. The meeting takes place without the knowledge of French consular authorities, and with no ambassador, diplomat, translator or bodyguard present - only Ziad Takieddine is in attendance.
- October 6th 2005: Nicolas Sarkozy makes a lightning one-day visit to Libya. He meets Muammar Gaddafi there, officially to discuss counter-terrorism and illegal immigration. Several witnesses claim that Libyan support for Sarkozy’s future presidential campaign was discussed during this meeting. While questioned in police custody in 2018, Nicolas Sarkozy categorically denied these claims but admitted that Colonel Gaddafi brought up Senussi's legal situation, a thorn in the flesh for Libya as it sought to shed its image as a terrorist state.
- November 26th 2005: Nicolas Sarkozy’s personal lawyer and friend, Thierry Herzog, flies to Libya to meet with Senussi’s legal defence team. He proposes a legal and political plan aimed at nullifying the arrest warrant for the Libyan official.
- December 22nd 2005: Brice Hortefeux, the junior minister for French local authorities in Nicolas Sarkozy's ministry, also travels to Tripoli. The French ambassador at the time later admits he continues to struggle to understand the purpose of the trip. One thing is certain: like Claude Guéant three months earlier, Brice Hortefeux meets secretly with Abdallah Senussi in the presence of Ziad Takieddine.
- February 8th 2006: Thierry Gaubert, a former associate of Nicolas Sarkozy and someone with whom the former president maintained close ties (despite denials that were refuted by the investigation), receives 440,000 euros of Libyan money in a Bahamas bank account. The funds, transferred via an offshore company linked to Takieddine, are received just days after Gaubert writes “Ns-Campaign” in an electronic calendar note. He denies any connection to Nicolas Sarkozy’s presidential campaign.
Meanwhile, Sarkozy’s team is suspected of having worked for several years to nullify the arrest warrant against Senussi. A meeting on this issue reportedly took place at the Élysée Palace in May 2009 between Claude Guéant and Ziad Takieddine.
For the families of the DC-10 victims, these actions amount to a betrayal. Fifteen family members have chosen to join the Libyan financing trial as civil parties. “It's contempt for the DC-10 families, contempt for international arrest warrants, […] I have the impression that people haven't grasped this. Daring to do that, it's crazy,” Danièle Klein, who lost her brother in the attack, recently told Mediapart.
The flow of dirty money
The investigation uncovered further financial flows. In addition to the 440,000 euros transferred to Thierry Gaubert, the judges identified 1.2 million euros in Libyan funds withdrawn in cash by Ziad Takieddine from a Swiss bank account. The money was brought into France before the 2007 presidential election, and according to the authorities it was not linked to Takieddine's own personal expenditure.
Enlargement : Illustration 2
Takieddine has also admitted to personally delivering 5 million euros in cash to Claude Guéant and Nicolas Sarkozy between November 2006 and January 2007. The Libyan official Abdallah Senussi, who allegedly authorised the payments, provided identical details to the International Criminal Court (ICC): the same amount, the same dates, the same intermediary, and the same recipients.
Former Élysée secretary general Claude Guéant, Sarkozy's chief of staff, is also facing trial for receiving in March 2008 - three months after Gaddafi’s lavish state reception in Paris - 500,000 euros. According to investigators, this sum can be traced back to Bashir Saleh, the Libyan dictator's former chief of staff, and businessman Alexandre Djouhri. Djouhri would later, in 2012, assist in smuggling Bashir Saleh out of France following revelations by Media
part about the case, despite Saleh being subject to an Interpol arrest warrant. Spy chief Bernard Squarcini, a staunch Sarkozy ally and head of French domestic intelligence at the time, played a direct role in this operation.
The investigating judges also determined that, by the end of the 2007 presidential campaign, at least 250,000 euros in cash, in large denominations, remained unused in the campaign’s safes. This figure, according to the detectives and judges, reflects the large-scale circulation of cash during the campaign. Investigators were particularly intrigued by the existence of a vast safe that Claude Guéant opened exclusively for the presidential campaign, supposedly to store Nicolas Sarkozy’s speeches, as he claimed during police questioning.
Several witnesses involved in the campaign confirmed seeing large sums of cash in circulation. According to Nicolas Sarkozy’s campaign treasurer, Éric Woerth, these funds came from anonymous donations sent by post. However, this explanation was contradicted by a former official in charge of handling mail for the UMP, Sarkozy's political party at the time (it is now called Les Républicains).
A Libyan document, revealed by Mediapart, indicated that the total amount the Gaddafi regime was prepared to provide was 50 million euros. However, there is nothing to indicate that such a sum was ever disbursed in full.
A former Libyan prime minister, Shukri Ghanem, recorded in handwritten notebooks in April 2007 the existence of several payments amounting to 6.5 million euros.
Shukri Ghanem’s body was found floating in the Danube in Vienna, Austria, in April 2012 under circumstances that have never been fully clarified. Austrian police described it as an accident, while an American intelligence officer referred to it in a report to former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as a “highly suspicious” death and even an “unresolved crime”.
Sarkozy’s changing defence strategy
Faced with the mounting evidence compiled by judges and police, Nicolas Sarkozy has quietly adjusted his version of events throughout the investigation. Initially, he denounced the case as a fabrication by vengeful Gaddafi loyalists during the 2011 war. However, in his most recent hearings, the former president admitted he believed the Libyans had indeed transferred funds, mistakenly thinking they were financing his 2007 presidential campaign.
Yet, true to his reputation as a man who is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere, Sarkozy claimed during questioning that he had no involvement, directly or indirectly, in the matter, even at the risk of abandoning his two closest associates, Brice Hortefeux and Claude Guéant. “I had no way of knowing what the reality of their lives was,” he stated in his deposition.
Sarkozy now backs the theory that middleman Ziad Takieddine defrauded the Libyans by convincing them the money he received on their behalf was intended for Sarkozy’s campaign. “You are making significant assumptions with your hypothesis,” the judges responded during his questioning.
“In fact,” they went on to explain, “in 2006 you were tipped to be the winner of the electoral campaign. Muammar Gaddafi was in the process of returning to the international stage. Ziad Takieddine, at the time, had a wealth of about 100 million euros. Why [would Takieddine] misappropriate all the funds destined for your campaign and ‘kill the goose that lays the golden eggs’ when you were going to be in a position of leading the country and he was waiting for a 'return on his investment' with contracts that he could sign by invoking your support?”
On the contrary, as far as the judges were concerned the “secret meetings between Abdallah Senussi and Claude Guéant on the one hand, and Brice Hortefeux on the other, indicate that the Libyans sought direct confirmation from Sarkozy’s closest associates that the payments were indeed intended for his campaign”.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- The original French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter