The arrest of a former key ally of Nicolas Sarkozy, followed by him being placed under formal investigation for “criminal conspiracy”, marks a turning point in the judge-led probe into claims that the Libyan regime under Muammar Gaddafi helped fund the ex-French president's 2007 election campaign.
It was at dawn on January 30th 2020 that four anti-corruption squad detectives arrived outside Thierry Gaubert's home in an elegant four-storey building in the affluent north-west Paris suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine.
At 6.15am they rang the buzzer for his flat. After a lengthy pause the entrance door was unlocked without a word on the intercom and the officers made their way to flat number 2 where the door was already open. Thierry Gaubert was waiting for them. He is regarded as the missing link in the Libyan funding affair and as a legal timebomb for both former president Nicolas Sarkozy and the latter's close friend and former minister Brice Hortefeux.
Gaubery was questioned and held in custody for 24 hours before being placed under formal investigation, which under French law is one step short of charges being brought.
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The move comes nearly seven years after the opening of the judicial investigation into the Libyan funding affair and nine years after Mediapart's first revelations about it. Gradually, over the past few months, the pieces of the puzzle have begin to fall into place and the case has begun to take shape as evidence and witness statements have mounted up.
The wording relating to Gaubert being put under investigation serves as a warning shot in itself. He is being investigated for “criminal conspiracy with a view to the preparation of offences punishable by ten years imprisonment and in particular those involving the misappropriation of public funds as well as the active and passive corruption of a public agent”.
The reasons given for his bail conditions are also instructive. In order to avoid “any fraudulent interaction” the investigating judge Aude Buresi banned Thierry Gaubert from “being in the company of the co-authors of or accomplices to the offence: Nicolas Sarkozy, Claude Guéant, Éric Woerth, Brice Hortefeux and Ziad Takieddine”. Guéant was Sarkozy's chief of staff and right-hand man, Woerth was treasurer of the 2007 election campaign, and Takieddine is the middleman said to be at the centre of the alleged affair. All have denied any wrongdoing. Gaubert himself used to work for Sarkozy when he was mayor of Neuilly-sur-Seine and then budget minister in the 1990s.
The acceleration of the legal process in relation to Thierry Gaubert follows revelations by Mediapart in early December showing that this key figure from Sarkozy's entourage for more than 30 years had, in February 2006, received close to half a million euros in a secret bank account in the Bahamas. The money had passed via an offshore company belonging to Ziad Takieddine. Called Rossfield Limited, this company was used only between 2006 and 2008 to receive hidden money from the Gaddafi regime before sums were allocated to different destinations.
Following these revelations last year, those close to Nicolas Sarkozy and to Thierry Gaubert were at pains to let it be known, via the Sunday newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche, that the two men had not had the “slightest contact since 1996”. The problem with this argument is that detectives from the anti-corruption unit OCLCIFF have obtained various evidence which disproves this. When, just after arresting him, they searched Gaubert's flat, officers found in a cupboard a letter dated January 29th 2011 from Nicolas Sarkozy in which the then president of the Republic thanked Gaubert for the present he had just given him for his 56th birthday. The former head of state was born on January 28th.
The detectives also came across a personal invitation card sent by Sarkozy to Gaubert for a garden party held at the Élysée to celebrate Bastille Day, July 14th, in 2009, and a further six invitations sent between 2008 and 2010 for award ceremonies.
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When questioned about the present given to Sarkozy, Thierry Gaubert told detectives: “I remember having given him a book on cigars.” But he insisted that he had “left it at the Élysée Palace reception next to the entrance railings”. Gaubert noted: “I didn't give it to him in person.”
Seeking at all costs to sever the link between him and the former president, Thierry Gaubert said during questioning that his “relations with Mr Sarkozy had grown more distant because of life circumstances” but “for no particular reason”.
However, other evidence that Mediapart is aware of shows that the two men have never stopped being in touch, contrary to the story they are putting out via the press. One is a handwritten dedication in 2001 by Nicolas Sarkozy to “my dear Thierry” and “with all my sincere friendship” on the flyleaf of his book 'Libre' ('Free'), published by Robert Laffont. Another is a reference to a breakfast at the Prince-de-Galles hotel in Paris in December 2003. Then there are emails sent between 2003 and 2007 which prove that Gaubert played the role of a discreet provider of business for Sarkozy's law firm, when the latter was interior minister. There is also evidence of a lunch planned between the two in May 2005.
In the middle of the 1980s and during Nicolas Sarkozy's successful attempt to become mayor of Neuilly-sur-Seine, and along with the always loyal Brice Hortefeux, Thierry Gaubert was the future president's trusted supporter and guardian of secrets.
Having formally denied it to Mediapart, Thierry Gaubert finally admitted under questioning by detectives that the 440,000 euros of Libyan money that he received in 2006 “came from a company which I had forgotten belonged to Mr Takieddine”.
Yet when questioned in 2016 during an investigation into alleged tax fraud over the same payment, Gaubert had said that it had no link with Takieddine and that the latter had never sent him any such sum. “At what point should one believe you?” asked one police officer when Gaubert was being questioned in January 2020. Gaubert replied: “I don't remember being told it was Takieddine's money … It's very recently that I recall all that.”
To justify the arrival of this money, which was withdrawn directly from the Gaddafi regime's public coffers before making a brief stopover in a company owned by Takieddine, Thierry Gaubert gave the investigators a story which seems to have struggled to convince. He insisted that this sum corresponded to Takieddine's purchase of an unfinished house in Colombia whose ownership was subsequently transferred after the death of its owner, a friend of his called Thierry de la Brosse. De la Brosse was unable to confirm this, having died in 2010.
Why, if this were the case, was the money not sent directly to the owner of the house that Takieddine was supposed to be buying? Questioned about this Thierry Gaubert did not bat an eyelid and told Judge Aude Buresi that “at the time, Mr de la Brosse didn't have a foreign bank account”.
Takieddine, however, only went to Colombia once - where he stayed with Gaubert who owns a mansion there - and he told judges some years ago that he had “not liked the atmosphere over there at all, for me it turned out to be a place of prostitution”. His ex-wife, Nicola Johnson, had also confirmed: “Ziad was not interested in buying something in Colombia.”
Brice Hortefeux's legal position gets trickier
The version of events given by Gaubert to investigators seems even more bizarre given that not only did the supposed house purchase never come to fruition, but also that Thierry Gaubert never returned Takieddine's money. “In the end Mr Takieddine did not ask me to return the money because he still wanted to do something over there, but that didn't happen and we didn't speak again afterwards ,” Gaubert said during questioning. When asked about the money Gaubert replied he had done nothing with it. “I never had the opportunity to return it [editor's note, to Takieddine],” he said.
An analysis of Gaubert's bank account in the Bahamas, which was opened with the Swiss bank Pictet, has meanwhile shown that in May 2006 it was credited with 175,000 euros sent by a Panamanian company called Sander Business SA. Questioned about whether this had any link with Takieddine, Gaubert replied: “Not as far as I know.” At the same time he was unable to say to whom this Panamanian company belonged and what the payment corresponded to.
The investigators also discovered that in 2006 and 2007 Gaubert had withdrawn close to 200,000 euros in cash in France from the Pictet account. According to the police hypothesis, this money could have fed Nicolas Sarkozy's election campaign in 2007 in which, as the investigation has already shown, large sums of cash circulated in a hidden fashion.
When questioned, Thierry Gaubert was keen to show that he had absolutely no connection with Libya. But during a search of his property and personal computer in 2011 – in the context of the complex Karachi affair which involved the alleged siphoning off of funds from arms sales to fund Édouard Balladur's presidential campaign in 1995 – investigators found Libyan documents with links to Takieddine. Questioned about this on January 31st 2019 Gaubert replied: “We found things in my computer that he had himself put there. He used my computer one day and I knew nothing about all that.”
Among the documents in question was an Interpol wanted file on a senior Libyan figure called Nuri al-Mismari, Gaddafi's former head of protocol. “It's perhaps a document that Mr Takieddine put on my computer because he came to my place twice to use my computer as his wasn't working.” said Gaubert.
Taken aback by this response, the detectives asked him why Takieddine, whose wealth at the time was said to be measured in tens of millions of euros, had not simply bought a new computer. “It was quicker for him to use a computer that was working rather than buy a new one and get it working, which takes time,” replied Thierry Gaubert.
Investigators found out that the Interpol document found in Gaubert's computer dated from October 2010. At that time the minister of the interior was Brice Hortefeux, one of Thierry Gaubert's closest friends, as Mediapart has already documented and as numerous elements such as photos, diaries and police phonetaps show. “I know Mr Hortfeux but he would never have given me an Interpol document,” said Gaubert.
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Mentions of Brice Hortefeux, who has been accorded the status of assisted witness in the affair – which means the person can have a lawyer present and could potentially face prosecution – keep cropping up in the Libyan case for another reason. The Libyan payment to Gaubert was made just one month after a secret meeting in the Libyan capital Tripoli between Brice Hortefeux, then local government minister under interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy, and a senior Libyan figure, Abdullah Senussi. Senussi, who at the time was the head of Libya's military secret services, had been convicted in absentia and was actively being sought by the French legal authorities for having organised the 1989 bombing of a French UTA airline DC10 passenger plane over Niger, in which 170 people lost their lives.
The meeting in Libya between Hortefeux and Senussi, which took place on December 21st 2005, had been hidden from local French officials and – which was unprecedented – had taken place without the presence of the ambassador or any diplomat, security official or interpretor. The only other person present was Ziad Takieddine. Both Takieddine and Senussi have told the French legal authorities that the meeting involved negotiations over hidden funding, something which Brice Hortefeux denies.
An initial secret meeting with Senussi had already taken place at the end of September 2005 involving Claude Guéant, who has since been placed under formal investigation over the affair, who was chief of staff to Nicolas Sarkozy, himself also under formal investigation. And in the investigation Senussi has emerged as the person who gave the orders to send Libyan money that was received by Takieddine – who has also been placed under investigation – and which was then passed on, in particular to Thierry Gaubert, who is also now himself under formal investigation.
When asked for his thoughts about the secret meeting between his friend Hortefeux and Senussi, Gaubert told detectives: “I don't think anything about it.” When asked what he, as a former member of a ministerial private office, thought about a French minister meeting a state terrorist wanted by France, Gaubert simply suggested: “It could have been impromptu.”
The trip to Tripoli in December 2005 is becoming a thorny legal issue for Hortefeux. His chief of staff at the time, Thierry Coudert, recently told detectives that “this trip was organised outside of the office that I was running”. He added: “As it was to do with decentralised cooperation, I should have been informed.”
Questioned by Mediapart, Brice Hortefeux explained that it was “logical that Thierry Coudert doesn't remember. He didn't deal with international activities, which came under the minister of the interior's diplomatic cell.”
The French ambassador to Tripoli at the time, Jean-Luc Sibiude, has also given evidence which is potentially embarrassing for Brice Hortefeux. He stated that Hortefeux's trip to Libya as local government minister didn't make “much sense” and that he had never been informed of the meeting with Senussi and Takieddine.
The investigators have also noted that the bank account for Takieddine's Rossfield company, by which the Libyan money was passed, had been opened in the Lebanon on November 15th 2005, exactly the same day that Brice Hortefeux sent a letter to the Libyan authorities about his forthcoming trip.
Detectives also spotted another coincidence over a date. Brice Hortefeux's diary for November 20th 2006 show evidence of a face-to-face meeting with Gaubert, with the latter saying he does not recall the content of the encounter. On that same day Senussi had two million euros of Libyan money sent to the Rossfield account. “I have no explanation,” said Gaubert when asked about it.
Three days earlier, on November 17th 2006, Takieddine had been in Tripoli. The investigators suspect that Hortefeux could have gone there discreetly at the same time, as on that day the minister had suddenly cancelled all his meetings. Brice Hortefeux, meanwhile, has stated that he stayed in Paris to prepare for an interview with television journalist Jean-Pierre Elkabbach.
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The French version of this report can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter