Present at the trial for the first time, the singer and former model Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, her face partially obscured behind oval-shaped sunglasses, wearing a black parka above a dark blue top, jeans and white sneakers, arrived at the courtroom just ahead of her husband, Nicolas Sarkozy, and his group of lawyers and bodyguards.
Bruni-Sarkozy air-kissed the attendant entourage – Sarkozy’s longstanding friend and former minister Brice Hortefeux, and Éric Woerth, his 2007 election campaign treasurer, both co-defendants, and also Sarkozy’s loyal press attaché Véronique Waché and his PR agent Guillaume Didier.
This was where her husband, who she amusingly called “Raymond” in a song released in 2013, had spent two months answering charges of corruption, criminal conspiracy, receipt of the proceeds of the misappropriation of (Libyan) public funds, and illegal campaign financing, and where on Wednesday, like his 12 co-defendants, he was about to be questioned for the last time.
Bruni then followed her husband to the separate seats laid out for the 13 defendants and took off her glasses, appearing relaxed and smiling, unlike “Raymond”. Sarkozy, who turned 70 at the end of January, appeared nervous, pale as a sheet, and teeth clenched. He even dodged Bruni’s kiss, before she took her seat. He was wound up, and the coil was about to be released. “You know, coming here this afternoon, I had such anger inside me,” said the former French president.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
He took aim at public prosecutor Jean-François Bohnert, for saying in TV and radio interviews, just before the trial opened on January 6th, that he had the “conviction” of Sarkozy’s “guilt”. Sarkozy then targeted police commander Frédéric Vidal who, for ten years and under the judicial guidance of two successive examining magistrates, led the investigations which resulted in the trial.
“You have said that there considerable means put in place in this investigation,” Judge Gavarino told Sarkozy, “but what the investigator [Vidal, who testified earlier in the week] was able to explain was that he was on his own. He carried out the great majority of reports.”
“Who can believe he was alone?” answered Sarkozy. “Every time that I was questioned in the offices of the financial [crimes] squad I was never alone with Mr Vidal. He had colleagues. A superior. Representatives of the prosecution services. I never found myself alone with Mr Vidal.”
The former president, under the watchful gaze of Bruni – who is herself under investigation for her suspected involvement in the tampering of a key witness, co-defendant Ziad Takieddine who acted as an intermediary in the dealings of Sarkozy's right-hand men with Libya – then said he wished to tell of “three impressions” he has lived with. “It is now 13 years that I live with this, 13 years that I have carried on my shoulders the weight of this infamy,” Sarkozy told the court. “I had the impression that it started from the basic premise of ‘Nicolas Sarkozy guilty’ and that it was necessary to combine [to this, various] documents scattered around.”
Another impression Sarkozy described was that of being a scapegoat. “It was the rotten political class that I represented [and which] had to be punished”, he said. Speaking of himself in the third person, he added: “Whereas, this is not a trial of politicians, it is a trial that consists of knowing whether Nicolas Sarkozy had his campaign funded by Libya.”
Also among his impressions was that of being prosecuted to save the face of the judicial institution, with which he has along history of conflict. “To recognise a defendant’s innocence is not to lose face,” he said, addressing the magistrates. “If I should be found to be innocent, it doesn’t place the institution in question. I am aware of the weight that is upon you.”
In an almost breathless presentation, he told the court: “I want to state my innocence. I never asked for financing, directly or indirectly, for my 2007 [election] campaign. I never asked Claude Guéant [Sarkozy’s chief of staff and later interior minister] and Brice Hortefeux to meet with [Gaddafi’s brother-in-law] Abdullah al-Senussi. They themselves have said that they fell into a trap.”
Sarkozy was referring to earlier and unconvincing testimony at the trial from Guéant and Hortefeux about their separate meetings in Tripoli with Senussi who, evidence demonstrates, sought help from Sarkozy’s team to overturn the international arrest warrant issued in his name after a Paris court found him guilty in absentia of masterminding the 1989 mid-air bombing of a French airliner in which 170 people died.
“I never had the least proximity with Mr Takieddine. I even blamed Claude Guéant and Brice Hortefeux for their private relations with him […] I never took the slightest initiative regarding the judicial status of Mr Senussi. My campaign was the object of no illegal financing.”
He placed his “action towards Libya”, and even the invitation extended to Muammar Gaddafi to make a state visit to France in December 2007, as being in a humanitarian context. “I saved six lives, that’s not nothing!” he told the court, in reference to the ultimately successful negotiations to free five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor sentenced to death in Libya for supposedly infecting children with the HIV virus. Sarkozy sent his then wife, Cecilia Sarkozy, to accompany the medics out of Libya in July 2007.
“Who can say that in his life?” Sarkozy asked of his self-claimed exploit. “The five nurses and the Palestinian doctor – I saved them. However disagreeable, and perhaps inappropriate, that Mr Gaddafi’s visit to Paris could have been, if one looks at it with regard to [those] six lives, if I had my time over again, I would redo it.”
Changing the subject, Sarkozy said he “must perhaps” admit to one mistake. “I certainly committed an initial error, when the website Mediapart came out with its document,” he told the court, referring to Mediapart’s publication in April 2012 of a 2006 document, signed by the then head of the Libyan foreign intelligence agency, Moussa Koussa, approving payment of up to 50 million euros in funding of Sarkozy’s 2007 presidential election campaign. “I straight away understood the political consequence that this document could have, but I didn’t imagine the legal consequences. I was too confident.”
“The first Western strikes [NATO-led airstrikes against the Gaddafi regime during the 2011 civil war, which led to Gaddafi’s killing in October that year] had begun in 2011, and also the first accusations. I waited for the proof of what was being suggested. I told myself, given the proof didn’t exist, that they’ll not come out with it. Never could I have imagined that I would find myself in the situation of [being] a defendant. That was a mistake.”
When the court moved onto the subject of police phone taps (when Sarkozy was found to use the phones of others in an apparent attempt to avoid being listened to), he declared: “I was listened in on for months. And when one finds nothing one doesn’t say ‘he said nothing, because there’s nothing’ […] I’m not a highwayman. I’m not a bandit. If Mr Vidal found nothing more, it’s that there was nothing to find. Nothing.”
Repeating his claims at earlier hearings, Sarkozy insisted: “I say again that I am innocent. I never sought Libyan funding for my 2007 campaign.”
The trial will next Monday hear the speeches of the civil parties, before the summing up for the prosecution begins on Tuesday, which will include its recommendations on sentences, and which is expected to last three days.
It will end with the summing up by lawyers for the defendants, which is due to last from March 31st until April 10th at the latest, marking the end of the trial. The magistrates will then adjourn before announcing their verdicts, a process which is likely to last several months.
-------------------------
- The original French article on which this report is based can be found here.
This abridged English version by Graham Tearse