Nicolas Sarkozy’s return to active politics, and an undisguised future bid to return as president, poses a simple question: is his move made in spite of the numerous corruption cases in which he is implicated – or because of them?
His bid to become head of the opposition UMP party is widely regarded as a lever for him to become appointed as the party’s candidate for presidential elections due to be held in 2017. If his plan is successful, and if he is indeed re-elected, Sarkozy will benefit from five years of presidential immunity from prosecution, while also being in a position of significant power regarding the judicial and police services.
The former conservative president, defeated by his socialist rival François Hollande in elections in 2012, faces several potentially far-reaching judicial investigations that threaten him with considerable public embarrassment in the short term, and in the longer term far graver consequences.
Before announcing his return to politics, Sarkozy, 59, who after his defeat in 2012 announced he wanted to change the direction of his life, painted a public image of a martyr who was victim of a political and judicial plot, roundly attacking the various magistrates whose investigations implicated him – a risky, à la Berlusconi tactic that runs the risk of backfiring.
Sarkozy has built up a Praetorian guard, begining with the appointment of Frédéric Péchenard as his campaign manager. Péchenard, whose career has largely been spent in senior police management posts, was made head of the French national police force shortly after Sarkozy’s election in 2007, a job he held until François Hollande’s election as president in 2012. Sarkozy’s penchant for police allies saw him also appoint a former Paris police prefect, and former senior national police force director, Michel Gaudin, as his chief-of-staff shortly after his defeat by Hollande.
The Gaudin-Péchenard tandem is hardly anodyne, for it serves to protect against, and keep him well-informed of, the numerous ongoing investigations in which he is cited.
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His new political bid faces several important threats; the most important among these is a corruption case revealed by police phone taps of conversations between Sarkozy and his lawyer, Thierry Herzog. The ex-head of state, who in July became the first former president to have been held and questioned in custody, is suspected of having used his lawyer to obtain confidential legal information about the Bettencourt affair from senior judge Gilbert Azibert. In return Azibert is said to have sought help in getting a top judicial job in Monaco
After being held for questioning in July, Sarkozy, along with Herzog, was placed under formal investigation – one step short of being charged - for 'active corruption', 'influence peddling' and receiving information as a result of the violation of rules on professional secrecy (see more here).
It is common strategy in cases where evidence is stacked against an accused that the defence attempts to demonstrate that a judicial investigation is flawed on technical grounds, that the proper legal procedure has not been followed. Thus it is that Sarkozy and Herzog earlier this month lodged a joint complaint with the Paris appeal court contesting the legality of the phone taps that revealed their plotting over Azibert. The ultimate aim would be to have the entire case against him thrown out, but the procedure, whatever the final result, promises to be a long one.
Among other cases threatening Sarkozy is a judicial investigation into suspected illegal funding by former Libyan president Muammar Gaddafi of his 2007 presidential election campaign which, at least in theory, could see him again placed under investigation.
His campaign funding, this time in relation to his failed 2012 re-election bid, is also under scrutiny in two preliminary investigations launched by the Paris public prosecutor’s office. One relates to the payment by his UMP party of a fine handed to Sarkozy by France’s Consitutional Court of 363,615 euros for overspending in his 2012 election campaign. The fine should have been paid by Sarkozy himself, and the UMP, which launched a fundraising operation among its militants to raise the sum, is under investigation for ‘breach of trust’ and ‘receiving’ criminal proceeds. The second preliminary investigation concerns suspected hidden financing of a campaign rally in the southern port city of Toulon at the end of 2011.
Sarkozy also faces a less immediate danger in investigations into the so-called ‘Karachi Affair’, relating to the payment of massive illegal kickbacks from French arms sales abroad to fund the presidential election campaign of former prime minister Edouard Balladur. The affair dates back to the 1995 election campaign, when then-budget minister Sarkozy was Balladur’s campaign spokesman. After a lengthy investigation led by examining magistrate Renaud Van Ruymbeke, the case is now with the Court of Justice of the Republic (CJR), a special court that is the only one competent to try acting or former members of government for wrongdoings while in their post. When Van Ruymbeke passed his investigation over to the CJR, he noted that Sarkozy could qualify for being placed as an ‘assisted witness’ in the case, a status less serious than that of being placed ‘under investigation’.
There are other ongoing judicial probes which, while not specifically targeting Sarkozy, promise to embarrass the former president in their exposure of the opaque dealings and favouritism that characterized political life during his term of office.
One of these is the 'Bygmalion affair', a funding scam which in May forced UMP president Jean-François Copé to stand down. It centres on fake invoices made out to the UMP by a PR and events-organising company called Bygmalion which, via its events -organising subsidiary, Event & Cie, was hired by the party to organise Sarkozy’s election campaign meetings. It sent the party bills for its services that were deliberately under-costed in order to meet the legal ceiling for campaign spending. According to confidential documents obtained by Mediapart, Sarkozy’s campaign spending in reality totalled at least just more than 39 million euros, of which 17 million euros was concealed behind faked invoices organised by UMP officials.
The fraudulent system was first publicly confirmed by Bygmalion’s lawyer Patrick Maisonneuve during a press conference in May, when the company’s offices were searched by police. “There were indeed fake invoices made out on the UMP’s request, and even imposed on the company Bygmalion by the UMP, to conceal the campaign expenses of Nicolas Sarkozy,” he said. Later that same day, in a tearful interview on BFM TV, the deputy director of Sarkozy’s 2012 campaign, Jérôme Lavrilleux, admitted the illegal double book-keeping.
A preliminary investigation has been opened by the public prosecutor’s office into “fraud”, “abuse of trust” and “misuse of company assets”, and it threatens grave consequences for both the party and several of its senior figures, notably Copé.
Elsewhere, the recently-created financial affairs public prosecutor’s office this summer opened an investigation citing suspected ‘misappropriation of public funds’ and ‘favouritism’ over the use, during Sarkozy’s presidency, of public funds to pay for PR services and opinion surveys by the government of then-prime minister François Fillon. That mirrors an ongoing judicial investigation, also into suspected ‘misappropriation of public funds’ and ‘favouritism’, that centres on public opinion surveys paid by the presidential office under Sarkozy. It is alleged that the presidency spent millions euros of public funds on the surveys, to the benefit of friends and close advisers including Patrick Buisson, who headed polling agency Publifact.
On top of all the above are the two parallel judicial investigations into the highly controversial circumstances by which French tycoon Bernard Tapie, who in 1997 served a jail term for corruption conviction, was awarded 403 million euros of public money in an out-of-court arbitration settlement decided one year after Sarkozy was elected president in 2007. Tapie, who once served as a minister under socialist president François Mitterrand, turned political coats to lend his support for Sarkozy’s election campaign. The arbitration settlement ended a court battle lasting several years between Tapie and a public agency responsible for the liabilities of the defunct state-owned Crédit Lyonnais bank which Tapie claimed had defrauded him during its sale on his behalf of sportswear company Adidas when he was the firm’s owner. The Sarkozy government’s decision to reach a settlement by private arbitration provided the opportunity of an award that could never have been obtained by Tapie while the case remained with the courts. Sarkozy’s former finance minister Christine Lagarde, now head of the International Monetary Fund, is cited in an ongoing investigation into this complex case by the Court of Justice of the Republic.
But the list of cases that highlight the scandal-spun term of office of the former president does not stop there. His friends and allies under the judicial spotlight and who potentially face various corruption charges are his longstanding aide and former interior minister Claude Guéant (see here and here), the industrialist Serge Dassault (see here), and Patrick Balkany, the high-profile UMP Member of Parliament and mayor of Paris suburb Levallois-Perret. Along with these is also François Pérol, chairman of French bank BPCE, and who is under investigation for suspected conflict of interest over his appointment to head the banking group that he helped create while serving as Sarkozy’s deputy chief-of-staff and economic advisor when the latter was president.
Last but far from least is the trial due to open in Bordeaux on January 26th 2015 centred on the so-called ‘Bettencourt affair’ and which is due to last up to five weeks. Ten defendants, including Sarkozy’s former presidential campaign treasurer and subsequently budget minister, Eric Woerth, will answer various charges - including tax evasion, fraud, breach of trust - relating to the alleged plundering of part of the fortune of Liliane Bettencourt, the 91-year-old heiress of French cosmetic giant L’Oréal who suffers from a form of dementia.
This high-profile case, largely revealed by Mediapart, was one of the major political scandals under Sarkozy’s presidency, and which unveiled, beyond a sordid tale of high-society money-grabbers, a web of corruption and influence peddling that also implicated Sarkozy. He was briefly placed under investigation over suspicion that he had obtained illegal funding from the ailing billionaire, before the case against him was dropped. However, in their written ruling the investigating magistrates noted Sarkozy's "manifestly abusive behaviour", the fact that he asked for "hidden financial support" from an "elderly and vulnerable person" and implied that Sarkozy lied about how often he had met Bettencourt.
Woerth faces a second trial in March next year for influence peddling over the attribution, when he was minister, of the Légion d’honneur, France’s highest award of civil merit, to Bettencourt’s wealth and investment manager Patrice de Maistre, after the latter employed Woerth’s wife.
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- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse