Forcing himself to keep his composure, he has been visibly impatient and desperate to have his say since the opening of his trial. Finally, on Monday December 7th, Nicolas Sarkozy was given his chance when he was cross-examined in the 32nd criminal chamber of the Paris courts at his corruption trial, where is is accused of influence peddling and corruption. His co-defendants are his lawyer and friend Thierry Herzog and former senior magistrate Gilbert Azibert, the judge he is accused of trying to bribe in return for confidential judicial information.
When his turn came to give evidence in the witness box – in fact, it is more of a stand – the former head of state first made a declaration, as is his legal right. “Allow me to state formally that I have never committed the slightest act of corruption. Never,” he told the court. This included when he was a mayor, Member of Parliament, government minister and president of the Republic, he said. “I have never peddled my presumed or actual influence,” he stated.
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Having made his point, Nicolas Sarkozy went on to express his anger at the way that he had been treated since the start of the so-called 'Paul Bismuth affair' – named after the alias under which his tapped mobile phone was purchased – six years ago. With a cold fury he catalogued how he had been held in custody, taken in a police car and had been placed under investigation during questioning at night. There were also the disproportionate means he said were used to pursue the judicial investigation.
“You see before you a man who had more than 3,700 private conversations eavesdropped … with my wife, my children, my doctor, my political friends, my lawyer ...” he exclaimed. “And the result is five or six extracts of conversations with my old friend and lawyer Thierry Herzog!”
In fact, in accordance with France's code on criminal law procedures, the only transcript of judge-authorised phone taps that feature in the case are those that appear to point to an offence being committed. In the current case that is the promise to pull some strings for the senior magistrate Gilbert Azibert to thank him for the unofficial actions he had undertaken at the Cour de Cassation appeal court, gleaning information from colleagues to keep Thierry Herzog informed about the fate of Nicolas Sarkozy's official diaries. At the time these were in the hands of judges investigating the Bettencourt affair. Invoking the confidentiality of a lawyer's privileged conversations with their client, the defence has been seeking to get the proceedings annulled, or at least to exclude the most embarrassing transcripts.
After starting off serious and composed, Nicolas Sarkozy's tone started to get more excited and his speech quickened. “Who has never said stupid things on the telephone? Who has never said things that he wasn't thinking on the telephone?” the former president said to the judges who were sat impassively in front of him. “We even saw searches carried out at the Cour de Cassation, for the first time in history … It's the case of the century! And it was just my presence that triggered that! Yet after six years what have we observed? Not a centime at stake. No victim. The decision of the Cour de Cassation did not go the way I hoped. Everyone in Monaco [editor's note, where it is claimed Sarkozy was going to help Azibert get a plum job] said: Sarkozy did not intervene. The judges on the Cour de Cassation say that there was no intervention towards them.”
Along the way, the former president also craftily handed out a few plaudits to the judges sitting in the 32nd chamber. “Since being in your court it's the first time that I've had the feeling of being able to express myself before an impartial justice,” said Nicolas Sarkozy. And he thanked the court “for the calm way debates are conducted”. He said: “I will reply to all questions. I want to have this infamy removed.”
“I am not a conspiracy theorist, I don't play the victim in life, that's not my nature,” the former president continued in loquacious manner. But that did not stop him going on to complain about the investigating judges in the case, the financial prosecution unit the Parquet National Financier (PNF) and some of the media (Le Point, L'Express, Le Monde, Atlantico, Mediapart...) who were endlessly hounding him. Leaning on the stand, as if he was taking part in a televised debate or political rally, Nicolas Sarkozy pointed at the judges with his fingers and made sweeping gestures with his arms.
“I have never lied,” he said in a rebuking tone. “And yet there are some lies in this case! I have never lied and I am not going to start today. The lies are on the prosecution side!” As proof he cited the PNF's blunders over keeping confidential the preliminary investigation that they launched to find the identity of the 'mole' who had apparently warned the former president that his supposedly secure line under the name 'Paul Bismuth' was also being tapped by investigators. “Is that normal? Is that because I am called Nicolas Sarkozy and that I was president of the Republic that they have the right to drag me through the mud?” he demanded. “Sorry, Madam judge,” he said to the presiding judge as he gave way to her, ending this episode of wounded virtue.
But as soon as the presiding judge Christine Mée asked the first question about his relationship with Thierry Herzog, Nicolas Sarkozy became angry. While his lawyer was an old friend and a “member of the family”, he had also defended him in a “certain number of scandals which they tried to blame on me”, said the former head of state. These were the Clearstream, Bettencourt, Bygmalion, Gaddafi and Bismuth affairs, plus those cases which were aimed at harming him more personally, such as those involving François Pérol and businessman Bernard Tapie. Was that his fault? No. The higher he rose, the more attempts were made to harm him, he said.
What about his official diaries, which are at the heart of this case? They were the least of his worries, insisted Nicolas Sarkozy, even if he was “exasperated” that the justice system had access to them at the time. “I was not going to go to prison in that case. I wasn't going to earn a centime. At the time I was euphoric after being cleared in the Bettencourt affair and I wanted to win again. I'm like that, even at my age, I do things thoroughly or not at all. There wasn't much at stake. It was perhaps an immature desire to win, a refusal to lose,” he said philosophically.
As for his fellow accused Gilbert Azibert, the former president said he scarcely knew him. He had appointed him as secretary general at the Ministry of Justice under justice minister Rachida Dati in 2008. “I have never seen him as much as I have since I've been here before you,” said Nicolas Sarkozy, prompting broad smiles on the press benches.
“Could Gilbert Azibert have possibly given you opinions or advice on the different judicial proceedings that involved you?” asked the presiding judge.
“As far as I remember, no. He dealt with issues of law. Gilbert Azibert's added value on questions of fact was nil,” said the former president dismissively.
“Didn't Thierry Herzog inform you that he had sent [Azibert] the judgement of the judicial investigation chamber at Bordeaux in the diaries affair?” asked Judge Christine Mée.
“Absolutely not. For me my point of contact was [lawyer Patrice] Spinosi. I spoke to him several times on the telephone after the pleadings, and then when he sent me his fees which he asked me to pay, which is only natural,” added Nicolas Sarkozy, prompting smiles in the courtroom.
“The written transcripts seem to show that Gilbert Azibert was interested in your appeal, even though he was not working in the criminal division but in the civil division. What was Thierry Herzog saying to you?” asked the judge.
“I didn't deal with that. Thierry Herzog wasn't calling me all the time in this case, he was also calling Patrick Ouart [editor's note, Nicolas Sarkozy's former legal advisor at the Élysée]. Gilbert Azibert was neither in my entourage nor a subject of conversation,” insisted the former head of state.
Nicolas Sarkozy was outraged at the suspicion that he had gone on a short stay simply to meet his lawyer discreetly away from the phone taps that they had become aware of. He said that the stay in question had been a week's spa break with his family at a large hotel in Monaco. He also insisted that the telephone records in the case show that he had not sought to contact the minister of state in Monaco, Michel Roger, to help Azibert, as the investigating judges and the PNF thought. Instead, he argued, it was in fact Michel Roger who called him to ask if his stay was going well.
Nicolas Sarkozy said that this telephone conversation – in which the subject of Prince Albert of Monaco was mentioned – had been too short for there to have been any mention of the Azibert issue. If he had had a two hour meal with the minister of state he might perhaps have mentioned Gilbert Azibert's desire to round off his career in Monaco – because that would have pleased his friend Thierry Herzog – and he did not see what harm there would have been in that.
Getting worked up about the eavesdropping of his phone calls, the former president's legs, torso and arms became animated as he attacked the “truncated and reconstructed phone tap extracts which can give a perverted image of the reality”. As far as he was concerned, it was simply a few seconds of gossip of no consequence. “If WhatsApp or Telegram had existed I would not have needed Bismuth!” he explained. “Mr Prosecutor, Bismuth is WhatsApp!” he said theatrically, accentuating the 's' in WhatsApp and waving his arms about, to the great delight of the public who laughed.
“I am like that, I am a worrier. I constantly ask for news, for indications of the mood, and I need to be given good news,” said Nicolas Sarkozy, in an attempt to clear himself over his contentious conversations with Thierry Herzog, whom he depicted as clumsily trying to do the right thing, an accident-prone and loving friend.
When the questions became more detailed about Gilbert Azibert's unofficial actions at the Cour de Cassation – either to get information on proceedings from colleagues or to intervene directly with them – the former French president fell back on his poor knowledge of the workings of the top appeal court and his lack of understanding of written procedures. This is despite the fact he himself was a lawyer and had been minister of the interior and then president of the Republic and – as such – had kept a close watch on the justice system by appointing certain men to strategic posts (such as the prosecutor general at the Cour de Cassation, Jean-Claude Marin).
With every question Nicolas Sarkozy became more and more agitated, and begged the court to believe him “with all the strength and sincerity of which I am capable”. He said: “Never, never, never was I conscious that Thierry had committed the slightest offence of any kind, or that I had committed a misdemeanour. The reality is that they were saying trivialities on the telephone to me and that I didn't attach much importance to it.”
One therefore had to believe that there was no corruption pact and that the helping hand promised to Azibert was not a reward for his secret missions, as the prosecution said. “I swear to you, the idea that we were doing something we shouldn't could not have been further from my mind!” said Nicolas Sarkozy. “As far as I am concerned there was no link between the gossip about Azibert and gossip about the appeal. Thierry asked me for help for his friends a hundred times. A hundred times!” If he promised his friend Thierry Herzog to pull some strings for Azibert, it was more because of the “legal advice that he had given for twenty-five years,” insisted Sarkozy. He said: “My life, Madame president, has been about lending a hand. That's politics.”
In summary, faced with the compelling strength of the phone taps that underpin the case, Nicolas Sarkozy, the former president of the Republic, ex-interior minister and lawyer, claims there was a complete absence of any guilty intent. This is despite the existence of a telephone line dedicated to the issue and which was set up by his lawyer under a false identity, that of Paul Bismuth.
After describing how he had spent the evening of February 25th 2014 at a variety show in Monaco with his wife Carla Bruni and Thierry Herzog (“We were supposed to spend a nice evening with our wives and we had a horrible evening!”), Nicolas Sarkozy struggled to explain why in parallel with the conversations on the 'Bismuth' phone line there were also bogus discussions on the official line, as if to throw investigators off the scent. He stuck to his argument: his friend Thierry Herzog had not just warned him that the Bismuth line was being tapped. Instead, the discretion was over the imminent disclosure in the press of secret tapes made by Sarkozy's former aide Patrick Buisson.
“I ask you to believe me … Madam, I have been wounded, very wounded,” said an apparently emotional Nicolas Sarkozy in conclusion at the end of the hearing as he addressed the presiding judge.
The 'Bismuth' phone taps will not be played to the court even though prosecutors from the PNF had wanted them to be. The presiding judge, Christine Mée, ruled that once the seals on the recordings were taken off there was too great a risk that un-transcribed sections that were not relevant to the hearing could be played.
The prosecution was expected to conclude its case on Tuesday December 8th. All three defendants deny any wrongdoing.
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The original French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter