It is a case that involves a president, a dictator and an affair of state like no other. On Thursday August 24th two investigating judges officially called for the former president of the Republic Nicolas Sarkozy to stand trial in the Libyan funding affair, twelve years after Mediapart first revealed the scandal.
At the end of an official court document known as an 'ordonnance de renvoi devant le tribunal correctionnel' (ORTC) – which officially brings their investigation to a close - judges Aude Buresi and Virgine Tilmont rule that there is today enough evidence against the former French head of state for him to be tried for four alleged offences: “passive corruption”, “criminal conspiracy”, “receipt of the proceeds of misappropriation of Libyan public funds” and “illegal funding of an election campaign”.
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Since the start of the Libyan investigation Nicolas Sarkozy, who has already been convicted in two other cases involving dishonesty (the so-called Bismuth phone-tapping affair and the Bygmalion election funding affair), has denied any misappropriation. Like anyone accused of offences, he benefits from a presumption of innocence.
In additional to the former president, three of his former ministers - Brice Hortefeux, Éric Woerth and Claude Guéant – are also being sent for trial at what will be an unprecedented criminal hearing. Never in French political and legal history will so many senior public figures have sat as defendants in a political and financial case of such sensitivity: one which involves suspicions that a democracy, France, was corrupted by a dictatorship - in this case, Libya.
One of Nicolas Sarkozy's closest supporters from the past, businessman Thierry Gaubert, who worked with the ex-head of state at the town hall in the wealthy Parisian suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine and then in two ministries at which Sarkozy worked under the government of Édouard Balladur (1993-1995), is also being sent to face trial. So, too, are two other key figures in the scandal, Ziad Takieddine and Alexandre Djouhri, who are discreetly described in the corridors of power as 'intermediaries' but whom the investigating judges consider to be two agents of alleged corruption on behalf of the Sarkozy clan.
In total, the judges have decided to send 13 people to stand trial, following formal requests from the financial crimes branch of the public prosecution services, the PNF, which were made public in May this year.
An extraordinary judicial probe
There are several ways to see the Libyan affair. One is as a story in itself. Or as just one more story, though the most serious of them, involving a group of figures around the former president that has been devastated by scandals. This is not a trivial point: at least two of the future defendants in the Libyan affair court case, Thierry Gaubert and Ziad Takieddine, were convicted (at first instance) in another case, the Karachi affair. Its facts may go back to the mid-1990s but it shows striking similarities with the Sarkozy-Gaddafi affair a decade later.
In both of these cases the legal proceedings shed light on how France's relations with foreign powers, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia in one case, Libyan in the other, provided the setting for a hidden side of the Republic, one set against a backdrop of huge commercial deals, such as arms sales.
In addition to there being protagonists common to both cases, the roots and methods involved are also uncannily similar: presidential ambitions which were at the origin of it all, secret meetings, hidden diplomacy, state pressure, offshore accounts in tax havens, suitcases of cash, and favours from France, in particular to countries that are, at best, autocracies and at worst appalling dictatorships.
In the Libyan affair, however, the story went on to take a spectacular turn in the form of a war. Started by Nicolas Sarkozy in 2011, it was to cause the downfall of the regime in Tripoli and lead to the death of Muammar Gaddafi just four years after the “honeymoon” - to use the term employed by an American ambassador – between the French president and the Libyan dictator. The former had even wanted to sell nuclear reactors to the latter.
After ten years of investigation, the judges and detectives from the French police anti-corruption branch, OCLCIFF, were able to use a swathe of details and unprecedented material evidence to piece together the shadowy side of the Franco-Libyan story, one that goes beyond the official accounts.
The investigation involved hundreds of interviews in France and abroad. Thousands of documents (bank documents in particular) were recovered from the four corners of the planet; and around 15 international warrants were issued. Hundreds of pages of diplomatic or French intelligence documents were declassified. And, in the end, a former president and his most loyal lieutenants stand accused in what is potentially the most major scandal in France's Fifth Republic.
During the investigation Nicolas Sarkozy had to adapt his line of defence as detectives made more discoveries. For example, having denied categorically any problematic behaviour in relation to Libya and Gaddafi, the former president was later forced to abandon his two close employees, Claude Guéant and Brice Hortefeux, when questioned. “I had no information to know what was the reality of their lives,” he told the judges, criticising the “errors” and the “incomprehensible” meetings they had had with certain individuals.
The investigation itself has been contested numerous times over the years, including by Nicolas Sarkozy whose lawyers took legal action in a bid to end the probe. But the validity of this judicial investigation, which was led initially by Judge Serge Tournaire and then by his colleague Judge Aude Buresi, was upheld by the court of appeal in Paris and then the country's top appeal court the Cour de Cassation.
As to the main substance of the case, the judges believe they have identified two hidden funding networks, as Mediapart has described during 145 articles devoted to the affair – the first of which dates back to the summer of 2011.
Terrorist from Libyan state at the heart of the case
The first network was focused around Ziad Takieddine, the intermediary who was the link between the Karachi and Gaddafi cases. His own archives, obtained and authenticated by detectives, show that from the spring of 2005 it was he who had opened the doors of Gaddafi's Libya to Nicolas Sarkozy's private office at the Ministry of the Interior where he was then minister. According to the investigation, it was on October 6th 2005, the day when Nicolas Sarkozy made a brief visit to Libya, that the possibility of financial support from Colonel Gaddafi for the future rightwing presidential candidate first began to take shape.
In Libya, Ziad Takieddine's main contact was Gaddafi's brother-in-law and head of military intelligence Abdullah Senussi. He was a dangerous trump card: he has been convicted in absentia by a Paris court in 1999 for having organised the 1989 bombing of a French UTA airline DC10 passenger plane over Niger, in which 170 people lost their lives. He was later the subject of an international arrest warrant issued by France.
But that did not stop secret trips to meet Senussi in Tripoli between September and December 2005 by first Claude Guéant, Sarkozy's chief of staff, and then the minister for France's local authorities, Brice Hortefeux. The meetings took place without the knowledge of the French ambassador and the secret services, and without an interpreter. The only other person present was Ziad Takieddine. Several diplomats and senior intelligence figures told the investigation of their amazement that such meetings had taken place between senior French public figures and a state terrorist actively sought by the French legal system.
Senussi – who is today in custody in Libya – and Takieddine (who has fled to Lebanon) told the French judges that at both private meetings the participants discussed the secret financing of Nicolas Sarkozy's campaign in the forthcoming 2007 presidential election. Guéant and Hortefeux both deny that such conversations took place, and have remained very vague on the exact reasons for - and the nature of - their meetings, which they have portrayed as a trap.
However, investigations revealed that in early 2006, just days after the second meeting with Senussi, the latter had paid some 440,000 euros via Ziad Takieddine into an undeclared bank account in the Bahamas belonging to Thierry Gaubert. Part of this money was later withdrawn as cash in France.
Nicolas Sarkozy told the judges and the media that he knew nothing about these events, and had had no contact with Thierry Gaubert since the middle of the 1990s. Archives obtained by detectives show that this was a white lie, as Mediapart has revealed. In fact, Nicolas Sarkozy and Thierry Gaubert had never stopped being in contact during those years, whether directly or via Brice Hortefeux, and even sometimes in connection with Ziad Takieddine's Libyan business affairs.
A “diary entry” by Thierry Gaubert, written a few days before receiving Libyan funds from Abdullah Senussi, even referred to “NS-Campaign”. “NS” as in Nicolas Sarkozy.
This build-up of information turned even more damning after investigators revealed that Sarkozy's team had, at the same time, stepped up efforts to try and annul France's arrest warrant against Senussi. Nicolas Sarkozy's personal lawyer, Thierry Herzog, even travelled to Tripoli in November 2005 to meet the Libyan terrorist's defence team to this end. Detectives also found traces of a meeting at the Élysée in May 2009 concerning Senussi's legal situation.
Meanwhile the handwritten notebook of a former senior Libyan figure, found by detectives after his suspicious death in Vienna in 2012, also contained notes concerning several payments to Nicolas Sarkozy and his allies at the time of the 2007 campaign. The name of Abdullah Senussi was also quoted in these documents.
According to the investigation cash was involved as well as bank transfers. Ziad Takieddine had indeed himself admitted transporting five million euros in cash between Tripoli and Paris, handing over money on three occasions: twice to Claude Guéant and once to Nicolas Sarkozy.
Both men vigorously deny this claim, with the former president even insisting to Judge Buresi that he had proof in his diary that such a handover would have been physically impossible on the date that the investigation suspected it took place. The problem was that when the time came a few days later to produce this diary, Nicolas Sarkozy had to tell the judge that he had in fact mislaid it.
The judicial probe has also revealed that during 2006 Ziad Takieddine withdrew more than a million euros in cash, money that had earlier been sent by the Libyan regime, before taking this amount back to France.
Detectives later found a quantity of undeclared cash involved in Nicolas Sarkozy's victorious 2007 campaign. A study commissioned for the investigation established that at the end of the campaign, and after all the various election services had been paid for, there remained at least 250,000 euros in large denomination notes in the drawers of campaign treasurer Éric Woerth, suggesting there had been a huge circulation of cash during the campaign.
In his defence Éric Woerth explained that the large denomination notes had been sent anonymously in the post by admirers of Nicolas Sarkozy who had been as discreet as they had been generous. This version of events was contradicted during the investigation and in the end regarded as “specious”, according to a police report.
The fact that during the campaign Claude Guéant had rented a strongroom at a branch of the BNP bank – it was big enough for a man to enter fully upright – was probably not something likely to allay suspicions. Claude Guéant himself explained that this giant strongbox was intended to keep safe Nicolas Sarkozy's confidential archives and speeches.
In the autumn of 2020, just after Nicolas Sarkozy had been placed under investigation for “criminal conspiracy”, Ziad Takieddine unexpectedly announced on BFMTV news channel and in the columns of Paris Match that he was withdrawing his accusations against the former French president. Within minutes the latter had gleefully greeted this apparent retraction by tweeting: “The truth has at last come out!” He also used the occasion to attack the judges in forthright terms.
However, this 'retraction' turned out to be no such thing at all. A new judicial investigation, still ongoing, has shown that Takieddine's interview had come following negotiations and the payment of money. According to judges, the operation was orchestrated by Michèle Marchand, a businesswoman who is a close friend of Nicolas Sarkozy and his wife Carla Bruni.
Several people, including 'Mimi' Marchand, are today under investigation for alleged “criminal conspiracy” and “witness tampering” in connection with this aspect of the case. And Nicolas Sarkozy, who was recently questioned by detectives as a potential suspect in that affair, could himself yet face legal proceedings over it.
The theory of Claude Guéant's personal enrichment
The other alleged corruption network identified by the judges was run by businessman Alexandre Djouhri. A man who used to work for allies of the late president Jacques Chirac and who then transferred his services to help out the new presidential candidate on the eve of the 2007 election, Alexandre Djouhri slowly managed to replace Ziad Takieddine at the heart of the Sarkozy clan. The two middlemen are rivals and have hated each other for many years.
Inside the Libyan regime Alexandre Djouhri's main contact was Bashir Saleh, Gaddafi's former chief of staff and later president of the Libyan African Portfolio (LAP), a sovereign wealth investment fund and one of the main investment arms of the regime.
Nicolas Sarkozy asked Muammar Gaddafi to help him in his campaign.
Having first publicly denied it, in the end Saleh told Libyan investigators that “Nicolas Sarkozy asked Muammar Gaddafi to help him in his campaign” in October 2005. He said that Gaddafi had replied to Nicolas Sarkozy: “If my friend Chirac doesn't stand, I'm ready to help you.” Several Libyan officials in post at the time, who were heard as witnesses last summer, have confirmed hearing this request.
Bashir Saleh is also facing proceedings in the affair over a payment of 10.1 million euros made after the 2007 election that he arranged via the LAP fund to go to an offshore Panamanian bank account belonging to Djouhri. The cover for the payment was the purchase of a villa in the south of France, which cost only a fifth of that. Following this transaction, Alexandre Djouhri is suspected of having personally paid Claude Guéant 500,000 euros when the latter was chief of staff to President Sarkozy. In other words, Guéant was paid with Libyan money, as the Paris court of appeal noted in November 2021.
This money, which was in the end used by Guéant to buy an apartment behind the Arc de Triomphe in central Paris, was paid in March 2008. This was three months after Nicolas Sarkozy rolled out the red carpet for Muammar Gaddafi for a state visit by the Libyan leader that was widely criticised in France. The judges suspect that in exchange for the money Claude Guéant – whose bank details were found in a search of Alexandre Djouhri's home – had put pressure on the defence group EADS for it to pay Djouhri some outstanding hidden commissions over the sale of Airbus airliners to the Gaddafi regime.
Alexandre Djouhri, who is also accused of having given Claude Guéant a Patek Philippe watch, crops up in another aspect of the Libyan affair too. This concerns the smuggling of Bashir Saleh out of France between the two rounds of that year's presidential election, following Mediapart's revelations about the Libyan affair.
Investigators have established that Alexandre Djouhri, working closely with France's head of domestic intelligence at the time, Bernard Squarcini, had overseen Bashir Saleh's flight from France to South Africa after the Libyan had been the subject of a 'red notice' from Interpol. When questioned about this episode, which the judges viewed as the removal of a key witness in the investigation, Nicolas Sarkozy insisted that he had never known anything about the circumstances of Saleh's departure from France, even though his former chief of staff, Claude Guéant, was interior minister at the time.
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- The original French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter
