Revealed: the 2007 notebook that detailed Sarkozy's Libyan election funding

AA small handwritten notebook kept by a senior figure in Muammar Gaddafi's regime in Libya details three secret payments made to Nicolas Sarkozy's team during the 2007 French presidential election, Mediapart can reveal. The notebook, kept by former Libyan oil minister Shukri Ghanem, was discovered after the latter's death in 2012 and its contents have been examined by French investigating judge Serge Tournaire, who is probing claims of illegal funding of Sarkozy's election by the Libyan regime.

In entries written in the notebook in 2007, Shukri Ghanem recorded how three payments totalling 6.5 million euros were made by the Libyan regime during that year's French election campaign, in which Sarkozy beat his socialist rival Ségolène Royal to become president. The document will be seen as important by investigators because it undermines claims by Sarkozy's supporters than the illegal funding allegations – revealed by Mediapart in April 2012 – are based on forged documents dating from after the fall of the Gaddafi regime in 2011

The French justice system has spent three years investigating claims that the Libyan regime handed over massive funding in support of Nicolas Sarkozy, who at the time was head of the right-wing UMP party and interior minister. Several key Libyan figures, including Muammar Gaddafi himself, had publicly made the claims before the West's military intervention in 2011 that helped bring about his regime's downfall.

Already the affair has led to Sarkozy's former chief of staff Claude Guéant being placed under formal investigation for “laundering the proceeds of tax fraud”, “forgery” and “using false instruments” over claims that he received 500,000 euros from one of the managers of Libyan state offshore accounts.

The senior Libyan figure who kept the handwritten notebook, Shukri Ghanem, had been prime minister of Libya from 2003 to 2006 and then oil minister until 2011. Close to Gaddafi's son Saif al-Islam, whom he took under his wing after the latter's university studies, Ghanem was a key regime figure in charge of its principal resource – oil – as well as its secrets. He was one of the leading figures in Libya who defected from Gaddafi's regime as France and Britain launched their intervention in the country in 2011.

On April 29th, 2007, exactly a week after the first round of the presidential election in France, Ghanem wrote an account in Arabic in his notebook of a meeting that he had held with another prominent member of the regime, Bashir Saleh, head of Gaddafi’s 40-billion dollar Libyan African Portfolio (LAP) sovereign wealth investment fund and his former chief of staff. Also present at the meeting was the then-prime minister al-Baghdadi al-Mahmoudi. During the meeting Saleh said that he had transferred 1.5 million euros to Nicolas Sarkozy, wrote Ghanem.

The names of other regime figures were also recorded in the notebook, as well as additional payment sums: 3 million euros sent by Saif al-Islam and 2 million euros by Libya's spy chief Abdullah Senussi, who was also Gaddafi's son-in-law. So according to Shukri Ghanem's notes, a total of 6.5 million euros was sent to Sarkozy's team, at the height of the French presidential election. Mediapart understands that the notebook also refers to a certain impatience on the part of the recipients about when they would physically receive the money.

However, Shukri Ghanem himself cannot be questioned by French judges over his account of the payments. On April 29th, 2012, his body was found floating in the River Danube in Vienna, home to the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and the city where he had taken refuge after fleeing Libya. At first Austrian police considered the theory that he had been assassinated, but later concluded that Ghanem had drowned accidentally after a heart attack. Nonetheless, there are numerous discrepancies and grey areas surrounding his death, and some of Ghanem's relatives still privately talk of suspicions that he was murdered.

Just before Shukri Ghanem's death Mediapart had made public an official Libyan document, dated from December 2006, that described the Libyan authorities' agreement in principle to finance Sarkozy's election campaign to the tune of up to 50 million euros. Several key Libyan figures cited in the official document also feature in Ghanem's secret notebook, which is now in the hands of the French justice system.

This notebook has done the judicial rounds in Europe. It was discovered at the home of Ghanem's son-in-law during a search by the authorities in Holland, a search carried out as part of investigations into a vast alleged corruption scandal implicating the giant Norwegian chemical firm Yara. In 2015 that case led to the biggest financial trial in Norwegian history. Shukri Ghanem had been claimed to be one of the leading figures in the corruption scandal that was unearthed.

Investigators who examined the notebook then found that the former Libyan oil minister was apparently also the guardian of some buried secrets about France's involvement with Tripoli. That was why, having been made use of by the Norwegian justice system, the notebook was sent by Norwegian corruption prosecutor Marianne Djupesland to the French authorities, for whom it came as a welcome surprise.

'Some funds were transferred to Switzerland'

It is because this notebook dates from 2007 that it undermines the main argument from Sarkozy's supporters in the Libyan funding affair. They claim that the allegations were invented after the fall of the Gaddafi regime in a bid to discredit France, the leading player in the Western intervention in Libya. Yet when Shukri Ghanem wrote his words in 2007, four-and-a-half years before the military operation, Sarkozy's France and Gaddafi's Libya in fact enjoyed such close relations that an American ambassador once used the word “honeymoon” to describe them.

At the time it was the arms dealer Ziad Takieddine, since implicated in the Karachi scandal involving illegal election funding and arms sales commissions, and very close to two close Sarkozy allies, Claude Guéant and former interior minister Brice Hortefeux, who had secretly arranged the rapprochement between Sarkozy and the Libyan dictator.

The document revealed by Mediapart in 2012 – dismissed as a “clumsy fraud” by the former president but whose authenticity has been established by technical experts at the behest of a judge – dealt solely with an agreement to fund the 2007 campaign. For the first time the Ghanem notebook shows that the payments did indeed take place, and its account tallies with statements from Saif al-Islam's former chief of staff, a man called Mohamed Ismail. He had described the banking channels used, with the money passing in particular via the Lebanon, Germany and Switzerland.

It is also interesting to note that the same person appears in both the 2006 document and Shukri Ghanem's notebook: Bashir Saleh. Once Gaddafi's chief of staff, he was put under the protection of President Sarkozy during the military intervention in 2011. In fact as the Gaddafi regime fell, Saleh took refuge in France where he found endless support from the government despite the Interpol arrest warrant issued against him.

On May 3rd, 2012, in the middle of the climax of the presidential campaign in France and five days after Mediapart published details of the 2006 document – of which he was the recipient – Saleh was hastily spirited out of the country with the support of the French secret services, Claude Guéant, then ministry of the interior, and businessman Alexandre Djouhri. It was a scene right out of a John Le Carré novel and bore the hallmark of a state operation.

Bashir Saleh was recently summoned to appear before judge Serge Tournaire but as Le Monde has revealed, he did not comply. When contacted by Mediapart in South Africa, where he has been in exile since leaving France, a clearly embarrassed Saleh said: “I'm not involved in the Sarkozy funding affair, I have nothing to do with that. People can write what they want.” Saleh added he had been friends with Shukri Ghanem, and said he had been unaware of any “particular health problems” at the time of the latter's death.

Sale now finds himself in a difficult position in relation to Sarkozy, to whom he owes his survival. According to a declassified report from the French external intelligence agency, the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure (DGSE), dated September 19th, 2011, on the circumstance of Saleh's extraction from Libya, the former Gaddafi right-hand man seems to have been entirely devoted to the former French president. In the report the officer dealing with the case writes: “With his eyes welling and his voice breaking slightly, [Bashir Saleh] displayed his emotion as he thanked on many occasions the French president and the many friends that he has in France ... and declared with some emphasis that he will never forget this gesture and that he will remain loyal to France whatever happens now.”

The other Libyan figure cited in Ghanem's notebook in April 2007, Al-Baghdadi al-Mahmoudi, was prime minister at that time. In a DGSE note written on May 26th, 2011, he was described as “lucid and influential” and “very active in Shukri Ghanem's entourage”, and has himself on several occasions confirmed the secret funding of Sarkozy's 2007 campaign by the Gaddafi regime. “Yes, in my capacity as prime minister I myself supervised the case involving the financing of Sarkozy's campaign from Tripoli. Some funds were transferred to Switzerland and Nicolas Sarkozy was grateful for this Libyan help,” Al-Baghdadi al-Mahmoudi told the court of appeal in Tunis on October 25th, 2011, where he had initially taken refuge after the war in Libya.

“Al-Baghdadi al-Mahmoudi said that he handed over a lot of money to a French delegation sent by Sarkozy, millions of euros in bundles of notes,” said one of his lawyers, Slim Ben Othman. “He has accounts documents. You don't hand over millions of euros without any signature. He recalls the first names of the [members of the] French delegation.”

Since being extradited back to Tripoli Al-Baghdadi al-Mahmoudi has been condemned to death, but is standing by his story. When a journalist from Libération met him in prison in August 2015, the former Libyan premier maintained his insistence that Nicolas Sarkozy's 2007 campaign had taken money from the Gaddafi regime. This claim is now backed up by the late Shukri Ghanem's notebook.

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• The French version of this article can be found here.

English version by Michael Streeter