On November 11th 2020, rolling news channel BFMTV broadcast video of a brief statement from Ziad Takieddine, a Franco-Lebanese businessman, who retracted damming testimony he had given to a French judicial investigation into the alleged part-funding of Nicolas Sarkozy’s 2007 presidential election campaign by the Libyan regime of Muammar Gaddafi.
Takieddine told the magistrates leading the investigation, and also the media, including in a lengthy interview with Mediapart, how he ferried millions of euros in cash from Tripoli to Paris in suitcases, recounting a delivery on one occasion to Sarkozy in person, and to the latter’s chief of staff Claude Guéant on several others. Takieddine, who for years had acted as a business and diplomatic intermediary for Sarkozy’s political team with Arab countries, said he transported the cash sums in late 2006 and early 2007.
But in the video broadcast by BFMTV on November 11th 2020, the ruined middleman retracted his accusations against Sarkozy, who at the time had been placed under investigation for “illicit funding of an electoral campaign”, “receiving and embezzling public funds”, “passive corruption” and, in October 2020, for “criminal conspiracy”.
“I confirm that it's not true,” Takieddine began, “Mr Sarkozy did not have Libyan financing for the presidential campaign, neither could Mr [Muammar] Gaddafi have done it because he never did it.” Takieddine claimed that he had been forced into making his previous allegations against Sarkozy by the judge leading the Libyan funding probe.
Takieddine was filmed in Beirut, in his native Lebanon, to where he had fled from France after a French court handed him, in June 2020, a five-year jail sentence in a separate corruption case, dubbed the “Karachi affair”. The ruined businessman appears in the 32-second video, shot on a mobile phone, sitting on a bench close to the Beirut seafront, a microphone wire dangling from his shirt collar, his speech slightly hesitant, as if reading from a script or reciting from one.
The day after the video was aired, French weekly magazine Paris Match published a lengthy article in which Takieddine repeated his retraction. Sarkozy took to social media to claim that he had at last been vindicated, calling for the investigations into his alleged funding by Tripoli to be dropped.
That probe was opened in 2013 following the publication of a series of investigative reports by Mediapart into the alleged financing of the 2007 campaign by the Gaddafi regime, and the activities of Takieddine as an intermediary for Sarkozy’s close political entourage.
Takieddine later U-turned his retraction, and a judicial investigation was opened into witness tampering. Four principal suspects were placed under investigation, including paparazzi agency boss and influential PR fixer to politicians, Michèle “Mimi” Marchand. The examining magistrates in charge of that investigation have estimated that the operation, dubbed “To save Sarko”, involved cash payments of 600,000 euros ( for travel costs etc.), while seized documents have revealed that a sum of four million euros was promised to Takieddine.
In August last year, at the end of the 10-year Libyan funding probe, Sarkozy and 12 other individuals were charged with various counts of corruption and sent for trial, which is due to begin in January 2025.
Mediapart has obtained the rushes of the interview with Takieddine in Beirut in 2020 (see below). They reveal that BFMTV, which made no effort to verify his claims, knowingly edited out extracts in which his comments did not match the narrative of Sarkozy’s defence.
The footage shows Takieddine as confused, and contradicting himself. He accused Judge Serge Tournaire, one of the magistrates in charge of the Libyan funding investigation, of forcing him to “say things contrary to what I’ve always said”. In fact, Takieddine had repeated his allegations of Libyan funding of Sarkozy’s campaign in several separate statements, and also in interviews with the media.
BFMTV’s management, which oversaw the broadcasting of the interview hand-in-hand with Sarkozy’s personal PR manager, Véronique Waché, and Michèle “Mimi” Marchand, also edited out all the passages in which Takieddine said the Libyan cash was not given to Sarkozy but instead to his chief of staff Claude Guéant.
All of which raises the question of how could France’s principal rolling news channel take the decision to run an “exclusive” that was so shabby in form and inept in the substance, and how could it really consider Takieddine to be credible in clearing Sarkozy’s name but not when he incriminated Claude Guéant? Finally, who exactly was responsible for editing the video so that only the extract in which Takieddine whitewashes Sarkozy is broadcast.
Mediapart contacted BFMTV managing director Marc-Olivier Fogiel, who failed to reply. Last Thursday, following Mediapart’s revelations of his extraordinary exchange of text messages with Véronique Waché in 2020 (published in English here) Fogiel told news agency AFP: “The channel has, as on every occasion, worked in all independence and was irreproachable journalistically.”
Fogiel, who has been close to Marchand for several years, told the BFMTV journalists’ representative body, the SDJ, that the images of the interview with Takieddine had been “shown” before the broadcast to the journalists on the channel’s criminal affairs desk. However, a former editor at BFMTV, Romain Verley, who was in his post when thye video aired, has previously told the documentary Media Crash (available here), and also the France 2 public channel’s current affairs programme “Complément d’enquête”, that the interview had not been shared with the editorial team but had instead been imposed upon them, already edited and finalised, for broadcast.
The judicial probe into “witness tampering” over Ziad Takieddine’s public retraction – which has placed under investigation both Sarkozy and his wife Carla Bruni-Sarkozy – has retraced part of the history behind the video.
Photographer Sébastien Valiela, who was sent to film the retraction in Beirut by Bestimage paparazzi agency boss “Mimi” Marchand, told the investigation that he sent the video “directly” to BFMTV boss Marc-Olivier Fogiel. “Mimi told me to send it to him and to deal directly with him,” Valiela said in a statement. “It was me who billed BFM. The sale of the video was the subject of a specific invoice for BFM from my agency.” He said he was paid 1,200 euros for the video, and paid 4,500 euros by Paris Match for photos.
Valiela, accompanied by Paris Match journalist François Delabarre, Michèle Marchand and other members of the “Save Sarko” team arrived in Beirut on October 22nd, and met up the next day to carry out the interview.
According to Valiela’s account given to the investigation, it was originally planned to be recorded at the house where Takieddine grew up, “one hour from Beirut, in the mountains” , but in the event it transpired that the intermediary no longer had access to it. “He showed us his house through the windows, outside,” said Valiela in his statement. “For me that complicated the task for the photos.” However, he said François Delabarre from Paris Match carried out his interview there (with a sound recording), which lasted more than two hours including pauses.
“He didn’t take notes,” said Lisa H. (last name withheld), in a statement given to the witness tampering investigation. Lisa H. was the assistant of Noël Dubus, a man with several convictions for fraud. On October 22nd 2020, Lisa H. had accompanied Dubus to Beirut (along with Marchand, Valiela and Delabarre) where he was acting as an intermediary to obtain Takieddine’s retraction. “He [Delabarre] talked to him [Takieddine] about all the cases, and about the Libyan financing of Sarkozy’s campaign,” she continued. “Ziad, as is his habit, instead of outlining from A to B directly, loses himself through digressions before arriving at B. Noël tried to keep him in check. He [Takieddine] was supposed to speak with key phrases. The key phrases were ‘I never gave money to Nicolas Sarkozy’, ‘Sarkozy did not receive five million [euros]’, […] and he was supposed to say that he was manipulated by Judge Tournaire.”
“In fact, those are the three phrases [Takieddine] said on BFMTV,” added Lisa H.
“It went pretty well,” said Valiela about the photo shoot in his statement. “I was able to do the photos I wanted. The only problem was that we were in the mountains, and we had to take photos in Beirut so that the reader could situate things.” Valiela said that Takieddine suggested going to the Beirut Marina, but the site “had nothing exciting” about it, and light was dimming as the evening approached. “I began a few photos and I realised that it was not going to be possible, it would be ugly. I went to see Mimi and I told her that we’d have to shoot again the next day, in a typical Beirut site.”
He said he packed away his camera gear, while Takieddine joined the others who had been standing a few metres away during the shoot. Meanwhile, the Paris Match journalist had returned to his hotel to write his article. “At that moment, the group came over to me, telling me that a video had to be made,” recalled Valiela in his statement. “I answered that I could film with my [mobile] phone. […] I’m not a specialist in video, but I told him [Takieddine] to place himself on a small bench where my belongings were. I fixed a microphone on him, I did a countdown, and he started. He gave me his speech. At the end of the first, he took the thing off, he says ‘No, no’, then he wants to do a second. And he begins again for a second time.”
“It was decided on the spot,” added Valiela. “At one point, we had thought of filming the interview but Takieddine didn’t agree […] The video at the port was done at the last minute. I think that at the beginning, Match or Mimi would have preferred that the interview be filmed because he contradicts himself every five minutes. But he refused. Afterwards, it was decided when I was packing away my equipment. It could be that Takieddine asked for it. I don’t know, I was packing my gear when they decided that.”
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- The original French version of this report can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse
