A ruling by a Paris appeal court has confirmed that former French interior minister Claude Guéant, a longstanding chief of staff for Nicolas Sarkozy, received a disguised payment of half a million euros from funds of the regime of the late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi.
The payment, which the court said came from the Gaddafi regime’s sovereign wealth fund, the Libyan Africa Investment Portfolio (LAP), was made when Guéant was serving as secretary general of the French presidential office, the Élysée Palace, during Sarkozy’s 2007-2012 presidency.
The details of the November 18th 2021 appeal court ruling, now obtained by Mediapart, represent a significant legal development alongside ongoing judicial investigations into the suspected secret funding by the Gaddafi regime of Sarkozy’s 2007 presidential election campaign.
Sarkozy has firmly denied any wrongdoing.
The case against Guéant, which his lawyers had contested before the appeal court, centres on a sum of 500,000 euros he received into his French bank account in 2008. The payment was discovered during the wider probe into the alleged Libyan funding of Sarkozy’s campaign, and was subsequently made the subject of a parallel investigation.
That led to Guéant being placed under investigation – a French legal step that requires a magistrate to have found serious or concordant evidence that a person has committed a crime – for “corruption”, “laundering the proceeds of tax fraud” and “use of forgery”.
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He is also placed under investigation for “criminal conspiracy” in the probe into the suspected Libyan funding of Sarkozy’s 2007 campaign, for which Sarkozy, 67, is also placed under investigation for “criminal conspiracy”, “corruption”, “illegal election campaign funding”, and “receiving the misappropriation of public funds”. The latter refers to Libyan public funds.
Two others among Sarkozy’s former ministers, Brice Hortefeux and Éric Woerth, are also placed under investigation over the Libyan campaign funding, which is suspected of having been organised over two years beginning in 2005.
Guéant, now 77, was secretary general of the Élysée between 2007 and 2011, after which he was appointed as interior minister. Between 2002 and 2007, he had also served as chief of staff to Sarkozy when the latter held successive ministerial posts. Prior to that, he was a regional prefect and, in the late 1990s, was general director of France’s national police force.
Once dubbed “the cardinal” and “vice-president” because of his power and influence when serving Sarkozy as chief of staff, Guéant received the 500,000 euros in March 2008 which was used to help with his purchase of an apartment situated close to the Arc de Triomphe in central Paris.
The sum was allegedly organised by French-Algerian businessman Alexandre Djouhri, 63, a key suspect in the Libyan election funding scandal, in return for Guéant’s influence in convincing aerospace giant EADS to pay Djouhri commissions on its sales to Libya of Airbus passenger aircraft. Guéant is also suspected of intervening with the budget ministry to provide favourable arrangements for an offshore firm controlled by Djouhri.
For his part, Djouhri is also placed under investigation, for “corruption”, “forgery and the use of forgery”, “money laundering the proceeds of tax fraud” and “complicity in the misuse of [Libyan] public funds”.
Guéant initially told the judicial investigation that the 500,000 euros came from his sale of two oil paintings by a 17th-century Dutch artist, but which art experts have since established would have been worth ten times less. The investigation described Guéant’s claim as a “false justification” aimed at hiding the true origins of the money, sent in a complicated financial trail via Saudi Arabia and Malaysia.
In their November 18th ruling, the appeal court magistrates, rejecting Guéant’s attempts to have the case against him thrown out on legal technicalities, noted: “Claude Guéant does not demonstrate that he was the owner of the paintings which he claims to have sold at a price out of proportion to their estimations [by experts].”
“In reality,” the magistrates added, “the financial and legal set-up, the payment to Claude Guéant of 500,000 euros under cover of a supposed sale of the two paintings, was organised on the instructions of Alexandre Djouhri.”
“These events can be analysed as being a secret payment made to Claude Guéant, on the instigation of Alexandre Djouhri, from the funds of the LAP [Libyan Africa Investment Portfolio],” wrote the magistrates.
Guéant has previously insisted that he “never benefited from one centime of Libyan money”.
Guéant’s lawyer, Philippe Bouchez El Ghozi, did not respond to questions submitted to him by Mediapart.
The judicial investigation has established that the transfer of the 500,000 euros received by Guéant in 2008 was initially sent from the account of a Saudi billionaire with connections to Alexandre Djouhri. It then landed on the bank account of a lawyer in Malaysia, who Guéant claimed was the purchaser of his two oil paintings, before being sent on to Guéant’s account with the BNP bank in Paris.
Crucially, the account of the initial sender was subsequently reimbursed for the exact same amount via the purchase, at a highly inflated price, by the Libyan sovereign wealth fund, the LAP, of a house in Mougins, southern France, which belonged to a company linked to Djouhri.
At the time, the LAP, which the United Nations described as being “under control” of Gaddafi “and his family”, was headed by Gaddafi’s chief of staff, Bashir Saleh.
In April 2012, Mediapart revealed a document, dated December 2006 and signed by the then head of Libya's foreign intelligence agency, Moussa Koussa, in which he instructed Saleh that the Tripoli regime had approved funding of up to 50 million euros for Sarkozy’s 2007 election campaign. When Mediapart published the document in 2012, the Gaddafi regime had been overthrown the previous summer, when Saleh eventually found refuge in France.
The ongoing judicial investigation into the suspected Libyan funding of Sarkozy’s campaign has established how, shortly after Mediapart’s revelation of the document, a covert operation was mounted to smuggle Saleh out of France. Bernard Squarcini, the then head of France’s domestic intelligence agency, the DCRI, was involved in the operation. At the time, Guéant was interior minister, and as such the DCRI came under his authority.
The move to smuggle Saleh abroad was made despite the issuing by Interpol in March 2012 of a “red notice” for his arrest pending an eventual extradition back to Libya where he was wanted by the country’s new authorities on charges of fraud, misappropriation of public funds and abuse of power.
French investigating magistrate Aude Buresi announced last July that her investigations into the payment made to Guéant were by then completed. Following the Paris appeal court ruling of last November, she must now decide whether or not to send Guéant and Djouhri for trial, and is expected to do so in the coming weeks.
If he is sent for trial, it will be but the latest in a string of legal woes for Guéant. He was definitively found guilty in 2019 of embezzling public funds between 2002 and 2004, relating to monthly cash sums he pocketed and which were destined for payment of police expenses by the interior ministry then headed by Sarkozy. Despite receiving a prison sentence, Guéant was spared jail but, following his failure to pay a fine and damages, he was ordered to be detained at La Santé prison in Paris last December, and was finally released on bail in February.
In January this year, he was handed a 12-month jail sentence over his role, along with four others, in the misuse of public funds in a fraud case centred on needless opinion polls commissioned when he was Elysée secretary general. He has since appealed that conviction.
He has also been ordered to stand trial for suspected illegal funding of his unsuccessful campaign in 2012 for election as a Member of Parliament in a constituency in a western suburb of Paris, and which has been postponed until the autumn.
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- The original French version of this report can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse
