A report sent to judges investigating attempts to conceal overspending in Nicolas Sarkozy's 2012 presidential election campaign has revealed the true extent of the sums involved. The expert report, dated March 17th, 2016, and seen by Mediapart, shows that the former president's campaign spent 45.8 million euros, double the legal limit of 22.5 million euros.
Of this total some 16.3 million euros were hidden via communications firm Bygmalion and its events subsidiary, which billed Sarkozy's right-wing party the UMP (now Les Républicains) for services that should have been charged to the election campaign. But the report also details for the first time an additional 8.2 million euros that were paid out by the UMP on behalf of the election campaign for transport, printing, tee-shirts and so on, but which did not go via Bygmalion. These bills were only discovered by investigators in autumn 2015, some 18 months after news of the so-called Bygmalion Affair first broke.
A number of people connected with Bygmalion and the UMP have been placed under formal investigation – one step short of charges being brought – over the election spending affair. These include former president Nicolas Sarkozy himself, who in February 2016 was put under formal investigation for “suspected illegal financing of an election campaign for a candidate, who went beyond the legal limit for electoral spending”. He denies any wrongdoing.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
The expert report carried out by a specialist at the financial section of the criminal court in Paris, and seen by Mediapart, is not exhaustive. But it is the first solid expert analysis of the amounts involved that the judges investigating the affair have received since the investigation began in June 2014. It shows that in total Nicolas Sarkozy's failed campaign cost at least 45.8 million euros, 21.5 million euros of which was officially declared in the campaign accounts, and 24.5 million euros of which were 'forgotten' or hidden expenditure. This means the campaign spent double the legal ceiling for candidates, which is set at 22.5 million euros.
To put it another way, there was more concealed expenditure in the campaign than declared spending. This revelation highlights the failings of the commission that oversees campaign spending, the Commission Nationale des Comptes de Campagnes et des Financements Politiques (CNCCFP). Though the CNCCFP rejected Sarkozy's account after the 2012 campaign, it completely missed the scale and industrial nature of the cheating. The CNCCFP had concluded that Sarkozy's campaign overspent by just 400,000 euros.
In relation to the 16.3 million euros of spending that was hidden via Bygmalion the expert report produces no surprises. The nature of that fraud has been known since the first revelations by Libération newspaper in the spring of 2014. A system of false bills and fictitious events was used which meant that the UMP ended up footing the bill for expenditure that should have been charged to the Sarkozy campaign accounts.
What is new, however, is the detail about the second aspect of the 2012 campaign fund affair, which involves a whole series of campaign expenditure wrongfully funded by the UMP but which did not involve Bygmalion and its subsidiary. Investigators came across details of this in the autumn of 2015 when they were searching through UMP (now Les Républicains) files. Some of the payments they found were small in nature, for example a payment of 2,875 euros for a leaflet to printers Colin Frères. But others were large, for example 105,667 euros spent on tee-shirts with the slogan 'Les jeunes avec Sarko' ('Young people with Sarko') and 329,352 euros on trains for a political rally at the Place du Trocadéro in Paris in May 2012. Where exactly did these bills come from?
Searching through the UMP's ledgers police investigators found a curious line called 'presidential election', created by the party's bookkeeper Eric G. In 2012 he had put against this line everything that seemed to him to fall under the heading of Nicolas Sarkozy campaign spending. It should be pointed out that the party had every right to pay directly for services for the campaign, to make the cash flow easier, as long as each item of expenditure was later highlighted in the accounts of the candidate himself.
The 'presidential election' line in the UMP's accounts comes to some 15.4 million euros that were spent in connection with the election and which never found their way into Sarkozy's campaign accounts. On its own, however, this figure does not tell us much. For Eric G. had simply lumped together all expenditure, including a pile of bills paid quite properly by the UMP and which the candidate did not have to declare, for example the cost of make-up, restaurants and also meetings on the evening of the polls themselves which were not electoral in nature. So it was down to the specialist at the court's financial unit to sift through and sort the bills into their correct headings. In the end she estimated that at least 8.2 million euros out of the 15.4 million euros should have appeared in Nicolas Sarkozy's campaign accounts. It is also worth noting that she was only able to analyse a part of the accounts.
Among the bills retrieved there was a 2.9 million-euro 'tab' run by the presidential candidate with Carlson travel agents for planes and hotels and other items, 12,953 euros for badges and banners from the firm Artista and a car hire bill for 766,186 euros. On each occasion the tab was picked up by the UMP. A crucial question remains, however: who was it who decided that Nicolas Sarkozy's accounts would not show any of this 8.2 million-euro sum?
At the UMP's headquarters the physical route taken by the bills was in fact quite straightforward. Eric G., a model employee who is viewed by investigators simply as a witness, made photocopies and deposited them, one by one, in the in-tray of Sarkozy's accountant Marc Leblanc, who was in charge of the official campaign accounts. Leblanc is today under formal investigation in relation to the affair.
The UMP's bookkeeper and Sarkozy's campaign accountant cannot agree on what happened to the bills that the former says he placed in the latter's in-tray. When questioned by the investigating judges, Eric G. insisted he had passed the bills on, while Marc Leblanc equally insisted he had not received them.
On January 19th, 2016, the two men were interviewed together by the judges. At one point they were questioned about the bills for the hire of three halls for public meetings, in Marseille, Strasbourg and Porte de Versailles in Paris.
“I'm categoric,” declared Eric G. “They were there [in the in-tray].”
“I'm categoric, if they were in the folder we [would have] put them into the accounts,” insisted Marc Leblanc. And so it went on.
In the end judge Serge Tournaire became irritated. He said to Marc Leblanc: “Isn't it rather that by adding these bills the legal ceiling would have been exceeded, and that you made the decision not to record certain bills?”
“No,” replied Leblanc. “Incidentally, I didn't know where we were at all in relation to the legal ceiling. I had no means of knowing.”
Eric G., meanwhile, had not been content just to hand over the photocopies. He had also sent a follow-up Excel chart of the expenditure that he judged electoral in nature to Marc Leblanc and his team, on a USB stick. Leblanc told investigators that he had never examined it, let alone used it, emphasising the supposedly limited capabilities of the bookkeeper.
However, an expert report recently sent to the judges underlines the similarities between Eric G.'s Excel files and the files handed over by Nicolas Sarkozy's accountancy team to the CNCCFP at the end of the campaign. “It is technically possible and probable that the [latter] could have been created from the [former],” the report concludes. If this were the case it would suggest that lines of expenditure were removed before the files were passed to the CNCCFP.
Leblanc strongly denies any such suggestion. “I never took the decision to remove anything, nor has anyone ever asked me remove anything either,” Marc Leblanc told the judges, constantly denying that he had received any instructions from Sarkozy's camp along those lines. Meanwhile Sarkozy's 2012 campaign director Guillaume Lambert, who was also present at the January 19th questioning, told the judges: “The only information that I had was that which was communicated to me … through the accountants.”
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter