She is one of the most discreet and powerful figures in the world of French media and politics. Mediapart understands from several sources that paparazzi agency boss Michèle Marchand, an influential PR fixer to politicians, and a confidante to French presidents past and present, was taken into custody on Friday June 18th as part of the ongoing probe into suspected Libyan funding of Nicolas Sarkozy’s 2007 presidential election campaign.
The businesswoman, who runs a paparazzi agency called Bestimage, was detained after apparently breaching bail conditions imposed in connection with a probe into the false retraction by a key witness in the Sarkozy-Libyan affair.
Back on June 5th 2021 Michèle Marchand, nicknamed 'Mimi', was placed under formal investigation for witness tampering and for “criminal conspiracy” to commit fraud with others and released under bail. Her bail conditions included a ban on meeting several people who were themselves under suspicion or linked to the investigation.
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The exact way in which Michèle Marchand breached her bail is not yet known and the identity of the person with whom she was in contact – even though this was forbidden by the judges in the case – has not been made public.
The paparazzi agency boss's lawyer Caroline Toby was not immediately available for comment. But before news of this latest development broke she had said of the case itself that she did not want to make any declaration “other than the fact that my client firmly denies the accusations against her”.
Marchand, 74, a confidante of Sarkozy and his wife Carla Bruni and who played an active PR role in Emmanuel Macron’s election campaign, becoming close also to the French president and his wife Brigitte Macron, was initially arrested on Thursday June 5th 2021 and taken into custody for questioning at the offices of the anti-corruption and financial crime police agency OCLCIFF. She was placed under investigation on the following Saturday after 48 hours of questioning, and bailed.
Four other people also taken into custody for questioning were likewise placed under investigation on that Saturday.
In the witness tampering claims against Michèle Marchand the witness in question is French-Lebanese businessman Ziad Takieddine, a key figure in the Libyan funding investigation, who last November gave an interview to French weekly Paris Match, and appeared in a brief video broadcast by French news channel BFMTV, in which he withdrew his previously detailed accusations that Sarkozy’s 2007 campaign was funded with cash by the regime of the late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, and which Takieddine himself helped deliver to Paris.
The case against Marchand centres on negotiations leading up to that interview last year with Takieddine in the Lebanese capital Beirut, from where he made his surprising retraction. Takieddine, who during the 2000s served as a business and diplomatic intermediary for Sarkozy’s political team, notably in Arab countries, fled to Lebanon last year after a Paris court handed him a five-year jail term for his part in a separate illegal kickbacks scam involving French arms sales to Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.
In his interview with Paris Match, Takieddine insisted that Sarkozy did not personally receive cash from Tripoli, contrary to his previous, longstanding claims made both before French investigating magistrates and also in a video interview with Mediapart, in which he described delivering the sums in suitcases. But in an account that appeared contradictory and at times muddled, he maintained that Sarkozy’s then chief of staff Claude Guéant did receive the cash from Libya.
In the short video of him, broadcast on BFMTV and filmed by a photographer linked to Michèle Marchand, he began by saying, “I confirm that it's not true”, although apparently unprompted by a question. “Mr Sarkozy did not have Libyan financing for the presidential campaign, neither could Mr Gaddafi have done it because he never did it,” he added.
However, Takieddine’s previous and repeated testimony to the judicial investigation of how the Libyan funds were delivered to Paris before and after 2007 has been largely substantiated, including by other witness statements and documents.
The surprising interview with Takieddine published last November was immediately seized upon by the former French president and a number of his allies as proof of his innocence and the weakness of the case against him. “The truth has finally come out,” wrote Sarkozy on Twitter on November 12th.
The placing under investigation of Michèle Marchand is all the more embarrassing for Sarkozy in that Takieddine’s U-turn was published in Paris Match, which is owned by the Lagardère media group, on whose supervisory board Sarkozy sits. That constitutes in itself a link between the interests of the former president and the editorial content of the group’s flagship weekly.
Paris Match journalist François Delabarre, who was sent to Beirut to carry out the interview with Takieddine, was also arrested and taken into custody for questioning on Thursday June 3rd, but was released by OCLCIFF hours later that same day without any further action taken against him. The weekly’s publishing editor, Constance Benqué, denounced the arrest of Delabarre as “contrary to all democratic principles”, and she described the move as “a form of intimidation” and a “violation of the rights and freedom of the press”.
In the now eight-year-old probe into the suspected funding of his campaign by the Gaddafi regime, Sarkozy, 66, is formally placed under investigation for “corruption”, “illicit funding of an election campaign”, “receiving misappropriated public funds”, and “criminal conspiracy”. Three of his former ministers – Brice Hortefeux, Claude Guéant and Éric Woerth – are also placed under investigation. They, and Sarkozy, deny wrongdoing.
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- The French version of this report can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter