There was a forest of black legal gowns as at least 20 lawyers crowded into a courtroom at the Paris law courts on Thursday March 7th. Some of them, leading lights in their profession, were there to represent the interests of those who had been among the most powerful people in the land. They include a former French president (Nicolas Sarkozy), two former interior ministers (Claude Guéant and Brice Hortefeux) and a former budget minister (Éric Woerth). But among their ranks, too, are a businessman close to the former head of state (Thierry Gaubert), two alleged agents of corruption (Ziad Takieddine and Alexandre Djouhri) and a former executive at defence multinational EADS. Once other defendants are added, the total of the accused comes to thirteen.
The hearing on Thursday was just a prelude to the Sarkozy-Gaddafi election funding affair. This was not the occasion to delve deep into the details of the case, but instead to prepare for an historic trial that will last at least four months - between January and April 2025 - and which will bring this courtroom alive. Last week's hearing was a pre-trial review in which the parties, the accused and the victims, make their initial observations, state if they intend to call witnesses, and announce any procedural issues they will want to challenge.
In the Libyan funding affair prosecutors suspect Nicolas Sarkozy and his inner circle of having formed a corruption pact with Muammar Gaddafi's Libyan dictatorship in the run-up to the 2007 French presidential election. According to the judge-led investigation into the case, this pact led to covert funding to the French side, and a range of benefits to Libya (diplomatic, legal and economic) in exchange.
All the accused in the case benefit from a presumption of innocence.
Some of the suspicion revolves around a senior Libyan figure called Abdullah al-Senussi, Gaddafi’s military intelligence chief and brother-in-law. Senussi is chiefly known in France for having organised the 1989 mid-air bomb attack on a DC10 belonging to French airline UTA which killed 170 people, 54 of them French. In 1999 a French court sentenced him in absentia to life imprisonment and since then he has been the subject of an international arrest warrant.
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The investigation has established that Abdullah Senussi had sent hidden funds (440,000 euros) to someone close to Nicolas Sarkozy, Thierry Gaubert, via a hidden account in The Bahamas, while two others from the former president's inner circle, Claude Guéant and Brice Hortefeux, were secretly meeting the state terrorist in Tripoli.
The investigating judges suspect that, in return, the Sarkozy clan sought to find a way of removing Senussi's arrest warrant, or at least promised this to the Gaddafi regime, which it had decided to rehabilitate in spectacular fashion.
In their order sending the accused to stand trial, the investigating judges note that Nicolas Sarkozy had “delegated to his friend Thierry Herzog, who became his lawyer, the task of suggesting to the Libyan authorities than the quid pro quo over Abdallah Senussi's criminal law status would be resolved after the election”. Investigators also discovered a record of a meeting at the Élysée in May 2009 about Senussi's legal situation, and the judges say this proves the ongoing nature of the French government's operations on behalf of one of the hidden financiers.
The anxiety of Nicolas Sarkozy's lawyer
During Thursday's pre-trial review two lawyers, Laura Heinich and Vincent Ollivier, announced that at least two families of victims of the DC-10 terrorist attack would seek to join the legal proceedings as civil parties, as is allowed in French criminal cases.
“The victims' relatives are particularly sensitive to the aspects of the case that suggest that the possible removal of the French [court's] life sentence against Abdullah Senussi might have been one of the main components of the financial quid pro quo destined for Nicolas Sarkozy's campaign as a candidate,” the lawyers said outside the courtroom.
“They intend to establish legally the harm done to the memory of their relatives and to their own suffering by those who, in their desire to gain power, did not hesitate to make a deal, for money, with the terrorists responsible for the deaths of more than 170 innocent people,” the two lawyers added.
But what could just have been a routine act announcing they were joining the case as civil litigants turned into minor judicial trench warfare thanks to Nicolas Sarkozy's lawyer Thierry Herzog. Showing particular aggressiveness towards his legal colleagues, Thierry Herzog immediately wanted to cross swords to make clear how inappropriate he considered the idea of adding new victims to the case.
Wanting to have a trial before the trial, even though this was not the point of the hearing, Thierry Herzog instructed his fellow lawyers to tell him if their clients were among those families of the terrorist attack victims who had signed a compensation agreement with the Libyan regime in 2004.
“We will respond in our written submissions,” explained Laura Heinich and Vincent Ollivier. “Well, I'm going to tell you,” replied an irritated Thierry Herzog, who insisted that anyone who signed the 2004 agreement had undertaken not to pursue any subsequent legal actions. Vincent Ollivier responded: “The events we are speaking of post-date 2004 and are not of the same nature. We will explain all of that to allay your concerns.”
“We well understand your concern,” added Laure Heinich, referring to Thierry Herzog's very delicate situation as both Nicolas Sarkozy's lawyer and, according to the prosecution, a protagonist in the attempt to clear the state terrorist Abdallah Senussi; the lawyer was questioned as a witness in the case. Nicolas Sarkozy's other lawyer Christophe Ingrain, who did not make eye contact with his colleague Thierry Herzog, was present for the hearing but did not say a word.
In the end, apart from drawing attention to the DC-10 victims and showing the great anxiety of the former presidential inner circle over this aspect of the case, it was not clear that Thierry Herzog's grandstanding was of great use to his client at this stage.
A second pre-trial review hearing is scheduled for the start of September at which the timetable of the trial will be more precisely established. That will pave the way for the opening of the trial itself at the start of 2025, a trial unique of its kind: in which a democracy is suspected of having been corrupted by a dictatorship and against which it ended up waging war.
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- The original French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter