Ten years after a judicial investigation was opened into evidence, first revealed by Mediapart in 2011, suggesting that Nicolas Sarkozy’s 2007 presidential election campaign received illegal financing from the regime of the late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, French public prosecutors have this month recommended that Sarkozy and 12 others, including three of his former ministers, stand trial over the alleged funding.
“Not only does this [the PNF recommendations] translate the quality of the accomplished investigations, it is also a reassuring signal to all those who have lost hope in our justice system when it comes to judging the powerful,” commented Vincent Brengarth, lawyer for Paris-based anti-corruption NGO Sherpa, which is a civil party (plaintiff) in the case.
Under French legal procedure, it is now for Judge Aude Buresi, in charge of the judicial investigation, which was brought to a close last October, to take the final decision on who should, or should not, be charged and sent for trial.
Sarkozy, 68, firmly denies any wrongdoing, as have also the 12 others “placed under investigation” – a legal term that is one step short of being charged, and which implies serious or corroborating evidence has been found to suspect an individual committed a crime. They notably include Brice Hortefeux, 65, and Claude Guéant, 78, who successively served as interior ministers under Sarkozy, and Éric Woerth, 67, who served under Sarkozy as budget, and later labour, minister.
Woerth, a Member of Parliament and currently the administrative and financial officer of the National Assembly, the lower house, was in 2007 Sarkozy’s campaign treasurer.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
The recommendations that the 13 are charged and sent for trial are detailed in a 425-page document by the financial crimes branch of the public prosecution services, the PNF, and which Mediapart has consulted. In the document, the PNF’s lead vice-prosecutor, Aurélien Létocart, sets out that what he called Sarkozy’s “entreaty” to Muammar Gaddafi for secret funding, beginning in 2005, was “objectivized” by the now ten years of investigations involving successive examining magistrates, prosecutors and officers from the French police anti-corruption branch, the OCLCIFF.
“For Nicolas Sarkozy, the hoped-for advantage consisted of obtaining secret financial support for the 2007 electoral campaign,” write the PNF prosecutors, who refer to “atypical and shady financial flows coming from Libya”.
“These schemes, which for most of the time were initiated by those close to Nicolas Sarkozy, could not, by their nature, be engaged upon without the consent and perfect knowledge of the facts by the latter,” say the prosecutors in their conclusions. “That knowledge was, moreover, established by the converging statements according to which [Nicolas Sarkozy] had solicited, and reached a deal, with Muammar Gaddafi to that end. These facts justify that the sending for trial of Nicolas Sarkozy be called for, for participating in a criminal conspiracy for the purposes of the preparation of the crimes of the misappropriation of public funds by a public official [and] to the prejudice of the Libyan state, of active and passive corruption of a public official, and the money laundering of these crimes.”
The PNF details that, concerning the period between 2005 and 2007, a principal route of the secret funding had been clearly identified: this was managed by Ziad Takieddine, the Paris-based Lebanese-French businessman who acted for Sarkozy’s team as a special intermediary with the Libyans.
The prosecutors said the judicial investigation had “demonstrated, in a manifest manner, the role played by Ziad Takieddine as an active intermediary between Libyan leaders, notably Muammar Gaddafi and Abdullah al-Senussi [editor’s note, Gaddafi’s military intelligence chief and brother-in-law], and holders of French public authority, Brice Hortefeux and Claude Guéant in particular, acting on behalf of Nicolas Sarkozy”. The aim of this, they detail, was “to permit the secret funding of a part of the 2007 presidential campaign”.
At the time of these events, Sarkozy held the post of interior minister, serving from June 2005 to March 2007, under the presidency of Jacques Chirac. Already in 2005, he was preparing his bid to succeed Chirac in the presidential elections held over two rounds in April and May 2007.
Claude Guéant was then Sarkozy’s chief of staff, a post he had held throughout Sarkozy’s period in Chirac’s government, beginning in 2002. Guéant would become Sarkozy’s chief of staff at the Élysée Palace, up until his appointment as interior minister in 2011.
Also between 2005 and 2007, Brice Hortefeux, a close and loyal friend of Sarkozy’s since the mid-1970s, served as a junior minister for local authorities. Following Sarkozy’s election as president, Hortefeux was successively appointed as immigration minister, labour minister and, finally, interior minister – when he was succeeded by Guéant.
Hortefeux, Guéant and the state terrorist
The investigation, according to the PNF, has demonstrated the existence of “secret exchanges between the close collaborators of Nicolas Sarkozy’s and Libyan dignitaries”. This was notably so between September and December 2005, when Hortefeux and Guéant, who were Sarkozy’s principal right-hand men, secretly met, during their visits to Tripoli and without involving local French diplomatic services, with Abdullah al-Senussi. At the time, Senussi was wanted by France, which had issued an international arrest warrant against him after a Paris court had sentenced him, in absentia, to life imprisonment for organising the 1989 bombing of a French UTA airline DC10 plane, in which 170 people lost their lives, including 54 French nationals.
“Two very senior political figures close to Nicolas Sarkozy found themselves dining with Senussi and visiting his home, in spite of the obvious reputational risk,” notes the PNF. The prosecutors underlined the “flippancy” of statements given by Hortefeux, who “contented himself with denying the corruptive finality of his trip and that meeting”, which he claimed had “no particular importance”.
The investigation has established that a part of the Libyan public funds which transited through Ziad Takieddine had been paid out in cash.
Claude Guéant, then Sarkozy’s chief of staff, and who met with Senussi in Tripoli in October 2005, “played an active, even essential, part in the putting in place and organisation of illegal financial support of the 2007 presidential campaign”, said the PNF. The prosecutors referred to events that were “materialised” through numerous elements found in the judicial probe, including records of travel, meetings, email correspondence, documents, bank transfers and cash payments, and tapped phone conversations.
It was following his meetings with Guéant and Hortefeux that Senussi set in train payments to the intermediary Ziad Takieddine, which totalled 7 million euros. “The investigation has established that a part of the Libyan public funds which transited through Ziad Takieddine had been paid out in cash, either directly by the latter via Globs (for close to 1.2 million euros), or by Thierry Gaubert (totalling 440,000 euros), in a temporality that was close and compatible with a possible funding of the electoral campaign,” writes the PNF. This was on top of Takieddine’s statements detailing the delivery of cash issued directly by Libya.
Thierry Gaubert, 72, is another longstanding friend and ally of Sarkozy’s, a wheeler-dealer who has held relatively minor political posts, and who the prosecutors also recommend should stand trial. In 2020 he was handed a four-year prison sentence – two of them suspended – for his part what has been dubbed “the Karachi Affair”, and which has numerous similitudes with the Libyan funding case.
The Karachi Affair centred on vast illegal kickbacks paid on the sidelines of French defence contracts with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan in the 1990s, when a large part of the secret sums were secretly returned to France via paid middlemen, including Ziad Takieddine, to be used for the 1995 presidential election bid of then prime minister Édouard Balladur. (Balladur had given Sarkozy his first-ever post in government, that of budget minister between 1993 and 1995, when he made Hortefeux his ministerial chief of staff, and Gaubert his deputy chief of staff. Sarkozy later became presidential election campaign spokesman for Balladur, his political mentor. The latter was finally defeated in the election by his conservative rival, Jacques Chirac, who went on to serve two seven-year terms as head-of-state.)
According to the PNF prosecutors, in the Libyan funding case Gaubert served as the “link” between Takieddine and Hortefeux throughout the dealings between Sarkozy’s team and the Gaddafi regime, and he made available “an offshore financial structure […] for receiving Libyan funds”.
“Several elements were of a nature to [allow to] presume that Thierry Gaubert had been unofficially associated with the preparations for Nicolas Sarkozy’s electoral campaign,” the prosecutors add, noting a reference found in Gaubert’s computer files which entered “Ns-campaign” against the date of January 23rd 2006. One month later, his secret Bahamas bank account received a payment of 440,000 euros which had been ordered by Senussi.
The PNF also refers to “the vain efforts of Thierry Gaubert and Nicolas Sarkozy to erase every trace of an enduring friendship” during the “suspect period”, adding: “One cannot understand their respective efforts to make it believed that there was a break in their relationship at the time of the events without seeing in this a link with the contested illegal financing events.”
In “parallel” with the funds arriving from Libya, the prosecutors add, the judicial investigation “has established that cash of unknown origin, and unaccounted for, had circulated, certainly in lesser proportions (250,000 euros retraced), within the UMP during the campaign”. The UMP was the conservative party, now renamed Les Républicains, for which Sarkozy was the presidential candidate.
The judicial investigation suspects that the cash sum of 250,000 euros which it found trace of, and which was used to pay bonuses to staff at the end of the campaign, was just a part of larger cash sums that circulated during the campaigning. The PNF underlines that “the question of the keeping of cash during the campaign was to be connected to the discovery, during the investigations, of the rental by Claude Guéant himself, of a safe at the BNP [bank]”. This was a vast safe, large enough for a person to stand up in, and in which Guéant claimed was used to store copies of Sarkozy’s speeches.
The prosecutors underlined that the explanations given by Sarkozy’s campaign treasurer, Éric Woerth, on the origins of the cash sums, which he said were essentially “anonymous donations”, were “in many respects invalidated”.
Prosecutors list the ‘quid pro quo’ of the alleged deal
In return for funding from Tripoli, “the judicial investigation has revealed the existence of diplomatic, economic and judicial compensations”, says the PNF. These included “the return of Libya on the international scene”, beginning with the lavish red-carpet reception given to Gaddafi during his five-day official visit to France in December 2007, and Sarkozy’s “personal involvement” in the liberation, in July 2007, two months after his election, of five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor who had been arrested and detained in Libya since February 1999.
They had been falsely accused of deliberately infecting several hundred children with the HIV virus at the hospital where they worked in Benghazi, Libya’s second city. The United Nations Human Rights Committee later detailed some of the torture techniques used by the Libyan security services to extract confessions from the medics, including electric shocks on genitals, suffocation, strangulation, cigarette burns, sleep deprivation, ice-cold showers and rape. The liberation of the five nurses and doctor became a major humanitarian cause among the international community, and for the European Union in particular.
Regarding economic compensations, the prosecutors cited communications surveillance equipment which was sold to Libya by French company Amesys, and the promise to the Gaddafi regime of providing it with nuclear power plants. This involved France’s then nuclear technology giant Areva, in which the French state was a majority shareholder, which was forced into the project despite its opposition.
As for the judicial compensation, the prosecutors confirmed that, as Mediapart has previously reported, “the legal situation of Abdullah Senussi, sentenced by the Paris court to life imprisonment for his participation in the terrorist attack on the UTA DC-10, appeared on several occasions in the [funding] negotiations as compensation”.
Numerous documents and witness accounts provide evidence that Sarkozy’s team were involved, between 2005 and 2009, in attempting to nullify the international arrest warrant issued by France against Senussi.
Finally, the PNF concludes that the evidence gathered by the judicial investigation now allows “to invalidate” Sarkozy’s line of defence, which for years has consisted of saying either that the illegal funding allegations amount to a “fraud” orchestrated by Ziad Takieddine, or a “fable” made up by members of the Gaddafi regime following the NATO-led attacks against it by France and Britain and which led to its downfall in 2011.
Nicolas Sarkozy did not respond to Mediapart’s request for comment.
Also contacted, Jean-Yves Dupeux, the lawyer representing Brice Hortefeux, said the latter “is surprised” by the prosecutors’ conclusions and that he intends “to strongly contest” them.
In a statement to French news agency AFP, Philippe Bouchez El Ghozi, lawyer for Claude Guéant, said the prosecutors’ conclusions about his client’s involvement in the case “are based on not the slightest proof, nor the slightest serious witness account nor the least accordance with evidence”.
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- The original French version of this report can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse
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