Mediapart has gained access to the transcripts of four days of questioning this month of Nicolas Sarkozy by judges leading an investigation into evidence of Libyan funding of his 2007 presidential election campaign, and reveals here how the former French president has chosen to disavow his loyal, long-serving right-hand men, claiming he knew nothing of their actions.
The now seven-year-old and very complex judicial investigation was initially prompted by Mediapart’s revelations of evidence that the regime of late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi had agreed to finance Sarkozy’s 2007 campaign.
On October 12th, at the end of around 40 hours of interrogation, the Paris-based magistrates placed Sarkozy, 65, under formal investigation for “criminal conspiracy”. Under French law, to be formally “placed under investigation” requires that magistrates have found serious or concordant evidence, or both, that indicates a person has committed an offence. At the end of their investigation judges must decide to send those placed under investigation for trial, or to drop the case.
Already, in March 2018, the former head of state was placed under investigation in the same probe for “illicit funding of an electoral campaign”, “receiving and embezzling public funds” and “corruption”.
Sarkozy firmly denies any wrongdoing. After he emerged from the questioning earlier this month, he issued a statement saying, “The French people should know that I am innocent of that which I am accused […] Injustice will not win.”
In the 139 pages of the official transcripts of his questioning by judges Aude Buresi and Marc Sommerer, Sarkozy laid responsibility for any wrongdoing onto his two longstanding right-hand men, Claude Guéant and Brice Hortefeux, describing their discussions with officials in Tripoli as, variously, “incomprehensible”, an “error” and a “mistake”. His argument was that he knew nothing of their dealings with the Gaddafi regime.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
The crucial period of those dealings was 2005-2006, when Sarkozy was interior minister and openly preparing to run as presidential candidate for the conservative UMP party (now renamed Les Républicains) in the 2007 elections. Guéant was his chief of staff at the ministry, later becoming election campaign director for Sarkozy who, after his victory appointed Guéant as secretary general of the presidential office, the Elysée Palace. In 2011, Guéant received ultimate compensation for his loyal services when he was appointed interior minister.
He replaced Hortefeux, 62, who has been a close friend of Sarkozy’s since his teenage years. He began serving him as a political ally in the early 1980s when he was made Sarkozy’s chief of staff when the latter was mayor of the western Paris suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine town. His first role in government was as junior minister (under interior minister Sarkozy) for local authorities between 2005 and 2007, when he was involved in the contacts and meetings with the Tripoli regime. After Sarkozy’s election in 2007, Hortefeux successively served as immigration minister, labour minister and finally, from 2009-2011, as interior minister. In a 1995 book, (Au bout de la passion, l'équilibre…), Sarkozy described Hortefeux as “a brother”.
Sarkozy served two terms as interior minister (in between he was briefly economy and finance minister) under the presidency of Jacques Chirac, the second of these running from 2005 to 2007 which was when he openly began preparing for the presidential election.
It was in 2005 that close contacts were made with the Gaddafi regime, when Claude Guéant, Sarkozy’s ministerial chief of staff, and Brice Hortefeux travelled to Libya for meetings and discussions prepared by Paris-based French-Lebanese intermediary and businessman Ziad Takieddine, who had been involved in various dealings of Sarkozy’s team with Arab countries since the early 2000s.
During the questioning of Sarkozy this month, the subject of Takieddine, suspected of playing, as he has admitted himself, a central role in the alleged funding, was recurrent. In his statements, Sarkozy dismissed Takieddine variously as a “madman”, a “manipulator” and a “clever and unscrupulous man”. Takieddine, implicated in earlier political funding scandals in favour of Sarkozy’s political allies, received several millions of euros from the Gaddafi regime in an offshore account belonging to him, and he has said on record that he personally delivered the cash to Sarkozy’s office.
Under questioning about Guéant and Hortefeux, Sarkozy said: “I had no element for knowing what was the reality of their lives, if it is that one really knows about the life of whoever it is.” He added: “It’s truer still regarding those who surround you, those we love and who can sometimes disappoint us.”
During the 40 hours of questioning that began on October 9th, Sarkozy insisted on the honesty of his statements, telling judges Buresi and Sommerer that he was putting his “guts on the table”, and appealing for their “common sense”, while also criticising some of the hypotheses raised by the investigation as “intellectually stupid”. His line of defence, as it emerges from the transcripts, is that if his entourage behaved wrongly it was not his fault.
In their written decision to place Sarkozy under investigation for “criminal conspiracy”, the magistrates underlined the evidence that his aides acted on his behalf and not their own, and that also Sarkozy, firstly as interior minister and later as president, served the interests of the Libyan dictatorship, and with no logical state rationale, in return for a “pact of corruption” in 2005.
Meanwhile, the magistrates appear convinced by numerous witness statements from Libyan and French officials, and the mass of documents obtained by the seven-year probe, that Ziad Takieddine, 70, played a pivotal role for Sarkozy’s team as secret emissary to the Gaddafi regime between 2005 and 2007.
Sarkozy told them that while he met with Takieddine twice in the early 2000s, he did not keep company with the French-Lebanese intermediary. He repeatedly said he “cannot explain” to himself the close relations between Takieddine and Guéant and Hortefeux, which he insisted he knew nothing of. He said that he was discovering only now the details of the relationship Guéant had with Takieddine. “You ask me if that’s incomprehensible, the answer is ‘yes’,” he added.
Enlargement : Illustration 2
Asked whether it was “credible” to imagine that Guéant would have been gullible enough to be taken in by Takieddine over a period of several years, given the suggestion that the intermediary was acting only for his own benefit, Sarkozy replied: “That has to be believed, alas. In any case, you cannot put that gullibility down to me. Why did Claude Guéant develop relations of I don’t know what sort of nature with Ziad Takieddine, I cannot explain to you, and what’s more it’s not for me to explain it to you because these relations, from my point of view, were not professional in the sense that I had not asked for them.”
“If the question asked is ‘Is Mr Guéant wrong to have confidence in Ziad Takieddine?’ the answer is ‘yes’,” he added.
“I never asked Claude Guéant to see Ziad Takieddine, never, neither orally nor in writing,” Sarkozy told the magistrates. “He never reported back to me on meetings, I don’t know how nor how many, with Ziad Takieddine.”
Sarkozy said much the same about the relationship between Brice Hortefeux and Takieddine. He said he had no idea of the number of times Horetefeux visited Takieddine’s penthouse apartment in central Paris, which the investigators understand was in fact on numerous occasions. “He didn’t keep me informed,” said Sarkozy. “Besides, he knew from the beginning how much I instinctively disliked Ziad Takieddine.”
“Brice Hortefeux knows Ziad Takieddine in conditions that do not involve me. Claude Guéant knows Ziad Takieddine, sees Ziad Takieddine, you established that yourselves. Their acquaintances with Ziad Takieddine are independent. They don’t have meetings all three together […] Is it a mistake for Claude Guéant and Brice Hortefeux to have relationships with Ziad Takieddine? I can only say yes. Does it make me the one who orders what Ziad Takieddine does in Libya? No, it’s impossible to say such a thing.”
Sarkozy asked the magistrates: “If what Ziad Takieddine had to do was so important, and so sensitive, why wouldn’t I see him, why would I not receive him [for a meeting]? If it concerned a corruption pact, would I sub-contract? What’s the logic? It’s sensitive, it’s funding, and I never see him?”
That statement was an apparent attempt to answer the hypothesis that it was precisely because of the sensitivity of the dealings with Tripoli that it was necessary to place third parties between him and Takieddine.
Between September and December 2005, Takieddine organised the visits to Libya of, firstly, Claude Guéant, and secondly Brice Hortefeux. They held meetings with a senior member of the regime, without involving the French diplomatic services present in the country, which was unusual. The official was Abdullah Senussi, Gaddafi’s brother-in-law who at the time was the head of Libya's military intelligence, and who was the subject of an international arrest warrant issued by France after his conviction 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. Senussi was also implicated in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am flight 103 above Lockerbie, in southern Scotland, which left 270 people dead, and the massacre in 1996 of more than 1,000 inmates at the Abu Salim prison in Tripoli.
“I never asked for such a meeting,” Sarkozy told the magistrates this month, “and if I had been asked my opinion about that I would have clearly said ‘no’. I’ll go even further, if I’m asked if it’s a mistake, yes, for me, it’s a mistake. To see Abdullah Senussi is a mistake, to be led by Ziad Takieddine to Abdullah Senussi is a mistake. Abdullah Senussi is wanted by international justice [agencies]. We don’t have contact with him, he’s a criminal. That’s my position.”
It was surprising claim that neither Guéant nor Hortefeux told him that they had met with Senussi. They were, he said, “tricked” by Takieddine. However, it is established that the pair continued to meet with Takieddine for several years afterwards.
“I very well see the idea that you have in mind of a pact of corruption that could have been knotted with this person against whom was issued an international arrest warrant,” he said. “Do you take me for a madman? You place in me in a scenario whereby I send Claude Guéant to negotiate, with a criminal and a nutcase [Takieddine], a supposed corruption pact. That makes no sense.”
The magistrates asked Sarkozy: “How do you explain, given the warnings of the [then French domestic intelligence services] DST of the risk that Abdullah Senussi might choose to join in official meetings to negotiate the lifting of the international arrest warrant against him, that Claude Guéant said nothing about this incident, except in the case of supposing that this was accidental?”
To which Sarkozy replied: “I don’t know what to do, it’s like hitting your head against the wall […] You have nothing to link me to Senussi.”
Sarkozy spoke of the “lack of discernment” of both Guéant and Hortefeux. “Brice Hortefeux knew Ziad Takieddine well before me,” he said. “He met with Abdullah Senussi in a surreptitious manner. Same answer for Claude Guéant, it is a mistake […] It is an error for the one like for the other. On the other hand, in what manner could that implicate me?”
In their separate statements to the investigation to date, Abdullah Senussi and Ziad Takieddine have separately stated that the secret meetings between Senussi and Guéant, like those between Senussi and Hortefeux, were centred on negotiations for secret funding of Sarkozy’s 2007 election campaign.
In a period of just weeks after the last of these, with Hortefeux on December 21st 2005, a total of 6 million euros was sent by Senussi into an offshore account belonging to Takieddine.
'Believe in my sincerity, I ask this of you'
During his interrogation this month, Nicolas Sarkozy repeated the suggestion, already advanced by French weekly Le Journal du Dimanche which has championed his innocence in the case, that Takieddine had defrauded the Libyan regime by pretending that the cash he received was destined for the presidential bid.
One of the magistrates in charge of the case told him: “Ziad Takieddine supposedly ‘conned’ the Libyans in 2006 by receiving 6 million euros on his accounts and by embezzling these Libyan secret service funds while pretending that they were for the financing of your campaign. I imagine that the Libyans must have asked him to account for that. But Ziad Takieddine takes insane risks by doing this, with regard to the [Libyan] secret services which are implicated in two dreadful terrorist attacks [against the UTA passenger plane and that of Pan Am] and knowing that the field of activity of Ziad Takieddine is precisely in Arab countries, the near- and mid-East. How do you explain such a taking of risks?”
To which Sarkozy replied: “I have made a lot of enquiries about Ziad Takieddine to understand why he was against me.” His conclusion was that Takieddine became “mad” because of a cerebral accident (in 2004) and the separation with his British wife (in 2007). “He is mad but not totally,” said Sarkozy. He claimed that Takieddine hatched a plot in conjunction with Mediapart, who he said “wants to harm me”, referring to a 2016 video interview with Mediapart when the French-Lebanese businessman claimed he personally brought 5 million euros of Libyan cash into France which he handed in person to Guéant and Sarkozy.
“You advance a great deal with your hypothesis,” said the magistrate, telling Sarkozy that it was “difficult to imagine the idea according to which he [Takieddine] would, in 2006, have misappropriated all the funds that the Libyans would have given him, whether that be in cash or by bank transfers”.
Enlargement : Illustration 3
Sarkozy was asked: “In effect, in 2006 you are tipped to be the winner of the electoral campaign. Muammar Gaddafi is in the process of returning to the international stage. Ziad Takieddine, at the time, has a wealth of about 100 million euros. Why [would Takieddine] misappropriate all the funds destined for your campaign and ‘kill the goose that lays the golden eggs’ when you are going to be in a position of leading the country and that he waits for a return on investment with contracts that he could sign while invoking your support?”
“What you have just said is false,” replied Sarkozy, who said Takieddine was “a thief” who “spun a web around Claude Guéant and Brice Hortefeux”. The pair, despite being senior members of the French interior ministry were, he said, “manipulated” and “taken advantage of”.
The investigation has established that a large part of the 6 million euros transferred by the Gaddafi regime to an offshore account belonging to Takieddine was then sent on to other offshore accounts of shell companies, which have yet to be accessed by the investigators. But what has been established is that at least 440,000 euros of those funds landed on a secret account in the Bahamas, in February 2006, 15 months before the French presidential elections. The account belonged to Thierry Gaubert, another longstanding friend of Sarkozy, who he served as deputy chief of staff from 1994 to 1995 when Sarkozy was budget minister.
Under questioning, Sarkozy said he no longer had personal relations with Gaubert “since 1996”, adding: “What I am telling you is the strict truth.” But in a 2005 diary belonging to Brice Hortefeux, seized by the investigation as evidence, is an entry for a lunch appointment between Sarkozy, Gaubert and Hortefeux. Other evidence, this time seized during a search of Gaubert’s home early this year, which included letters, invitations and presents, revealed that Sarkozy had never cut off relations with his old friend, as did also email correspondence found on one of Gaubert’s computers in a separate investigation.
On the subject of the 2006 transfer of the 440,000 euros to Gaubert, Sarkozy said “it is impossible for me” to make any comment. “No idea [sic] about the relationship between Ziad Takieddine and Thierry Gaubert, neither about the why or the how,” he added.
Enlargement : Illustration 4
Sarkozy also told the magistrates that he knew little about the events which led to Gaubert’s conviction in June this year, along with five others, for his role in a political funding scam in the 1990s. This was part of what has become known as the “Karachi Affair”, which relates to huge sums that were siphoned off from French weapons sales to Saudi Arabia and Pakistan in order to finance the 1995 presidential election campaign of then prime minister Édouard Balladur, who stood – and finally lost – against conservative rival Jacques Chirac. Sarkozy, who was Balladur’s budget minister from 1993 to 1995, was also his campaign spokesman.
The scam involved a complex system of kickbacks, by which sales of two French frigates (and other naval supplies) to Saudi Arabia, and three submarines to Pakistan, included commissions for intermediaries, who notably included Ziad Takieddine, who were imposed on the deals by Balladur’s team. The middlemen were to funnel cash from their takings back into the coffers of Balladur’s campaign.
Gaubert, 69, was handed a four-year prison sentence in June, two of them suspended. Among the five other defendants convicted in the case was Nicolas Bazire, 62, who was Balladur’s campaign director, and chief of staff between 1993-1995, and who is currently managing director of the Groupe Arnault, owner of luxury goods group LVMH. Bazir was handed a five-year prison sentence, two of them suspended. Bazire, who is also a board member of several large French corporations, has been close to Sarkozy since the early 1990s and was best man at the latter’s marriage to Carla Bruni in 2008.
All six defendants have appealed their convictions.
The 6 billion euros sent by Abdullah Senussi in December 2005 into an offshore account belonging to Takieddine, the bank transfer to Gaubert and the visits to Tripoli by Guéant and Hortefeux earlier that year, are all the more problematic for Sarkozy in that the Libyan funding investigation has established that his close team had actively studied the possibility of overturning the international warrant for the arrest of Senussi issued after his conviction for the 1989 UTA airline passenger plane bombing.
Gaddafi had asked that the warrant be withdrawn, as Sarkozy himself admitted when he was questioned in March 2018. The investigation has found evidence of several moves between 2005 and 2009 to have the warrant lifted. Notably, an archived register of visits to the Élysée Palace recorded a meeting on May 16th 2009 between Takieddine and Guéant, when the latter was secretary general of the presidential office. In a summary of that meeting written up by Takieddine and found in seized documents, the subject of their discussion was the lifting of the arrest warrant against Senussi, when Takieddine presented the legal “conclusions” of Thierry Herzog, Sarkozy’s personal lawyer and close friend.
Mediapart has previously revealed how Herzog travelled to Tripoli in November 2005 – one month after Sarkozy had visited the Libyan capital – when the lawyer presented Senussi’s Libyan legal team with a secret plan for quashing the arrest warrant. According to documents relating to that visit, Herzog was introduced locally by another Parisian lawyer, Francis Szpiner, who was in fact legal counsel for the families of the victims of the UTA airliner bombing.
During the interrogation of Sarkozy this month, he was asked how he might explain the May 16th 2009 meeting at the Élysée Palace between Guéant and Takieddine. The former president replied: “I can’t explain it to myself. Like I can’t explain to myself the necessity for Claude Guéant to receive Ziad Takieddine. It’s not just the subject discussed, it’s the principle of receiving him […] I have no explanation. I don’t know if Ziad Takleddine speaks the truth or not, what I don’t understand is the appointment given to him by Claude Guéant.”
The investigation has also discovered material proof that Guéant and Takieddine were involved in exchanges about the freeing of five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor imprisoned in Libya on accusations they poisoned nearly 400 children with the HIV virus (see more here and here). Libya finally freed them in July 2007, when they flew out of the North African country on an official French plane and in the company of newly elected Sarkozy’s then-wife Cécilia.
Sarkozy was asked by the magistrates why Guéant had sought Takieddine’s advice on the matter. “I understand that you ask me the question because I ask it myself. That things be clear. It is completely useless. I never asked him [Guéant] and it makes no sense. […] In any case, it didn’t happen on my request […] It’s his choice, it is not a choice that I confirm, that I validate or that I asked for […] It would be so much better if Mr Guéant could answer […] It’s difficult for me to answer about what he did himself, on his own initiative without, at any moment, me being associated.”
Sarkozy appears to distance himself from Guéant, his longserving chief of staff, at every opportunity. Another example of this concerned Guéant’s renting of a vast safe at the BNP bank in the centre of Paris on March 26th 2007, at the very moment when Sarkozy effectively took leave of his post as interior minister to put all his time into his presidential election campaign. It is established that Guéant visited the safe on seven occasions in the run-up to the elections in May. The investigation considers the safe may have been rented to store cash, which was used, evidence shows, on a massive scale during the campaign.
Guéant has told the probe that the safe was used to store Sarkozy’s printed speeches. Sarkozy told the investigation: “I don’t see why one had the need to rent a safe [of a size] in which a man could stand upright. At no moment did Claude Guéant tell me that he was going to rent a safe at the bank, but quite honestly I don’t think it was to hide something very villainous because if that was the case it’s not very discrete.”
In 2013, when Guéant was already the target of several separate judicial investigations, police tapped a phone conversation between him and his daughter. She was concerned about his legal plight and, according to the transcripts, told her father that “It’s in [Sarkozy’s] interest to be careful, because the day you decide to spill the beans…”, then adding that Sarkozy would “deserve” it.
Concerning Claude Guéant, one aspect of the Libyan funding case concerns his alleged personal enrichment. In March 2008, he received a transfer of 500,000 euros into his Paris bank account, which was routed through a complex financial structure behind which was Alexandre Djouhri, another intermediary close to Sarkozy, and also Bashir Saleh, the former chief of staff to Muammar Gaddafi and head of the regime’s multi-billion-dollar Libyan African Portfolio investment fund. In an almost comical twist, Guéant claimed the money came from the sale of two 17th-century oil paintings which were in fact worth nowhere near the sum.
“I ask you to believe me, I never had need of knowing, Sarkozy said of the bank transfer. “At no moment did Claude Guéant talk to me about it.”
Meanwhile, Alexandre Djouhri was extradited to France from Britain in January this year after an international arrest warrant was issued for his failure to respond to a summons for questioning in the Libyan funding case. Acting on that warrant, police at London’s Heathrow airport had detained him in January 2018 when he arrived there on a flight from Switzerland, where he has his home.
Sarkozy was questioned about the discovery of Guéant’s banking details – in the form of a “RIB”, a card of account numbers and branch details commonly used in France – during a police search of Djouhri’s home in Geneva. “I can’t say why, nor how, nor make the slightest comment,” Sarkozy told the magistrates. “I wouldn’t myself have transmitted my RIB to Alexandre Djouhri […] There is no explanation. But that’s not mine that was found, all the same.”
He was also asked about a move by Guéant, when he was in post at the Élysée Palace, to help Djouhri in a problem with the French tax authorities. “I was not at all aware of this intervention,” said Sarkozy. “I think you have sufficient information in the case file to understand that the relations between Alexandre Djouhri and Claude Guéant did not necessarily pass through me.”
Djouhri, who was earlier this year placed under investigation by the magistrates for nine suspected crimes, has a key role in the case. He is suspected of having taken part in May 2012 in organising, together with the then head of the French domestic intelligence agency, Bernard Squarcini, the secret flight out of France of Bashir Saleh immediately after Mediapart reported on his involvement in the Libyan funding of Sarkozy’s campaign. At the time, Saleh, who had found refuge in France after the fall of the Gaddafi regime, was the subject of an international “red” notice issued by Interpol for his arrest on behalf of the new Libyan authorities. At the time of Saleh’s secret exit from France, Guéant was Sarkozy’s interior minister.
“Claude Guéant asked me nothing on the subject of the red notice,” Sarkozy told the magistrates, again pointing the finger at his former right-hand man. “It’s to Claude Guéant that the question should be asked […] I defy anyone to say that the Élysée or one of my aides asked for that [Saleh’s departure from France]. I point out that at the time Claude Guéant was no longer at the Élysée since 18 months. He was no longer my aide.”
The magistrates asked the former president: “The head of the DCRI [domestic intelligence agency], who is a police officer in charge of executing the laws, participated in the exfiltration abroad of a person who, if he is discovered to be on French territory should be arrested in application of France’s international engagements, and that while in contact with the minister of the interior. Do you not think that that is seriously problematic regarding the functioning of the executive?”
To which Sarkozy replied: “You have in the file a network of contacts of Bashir Saleh which establishes that he did not go through me. What happened is not normal, but one can’t actively or passively reproach me over it.”
“I am but the parenthesis in a network of friendships existing elsewhere,” he added.
All through the four days of questioning, Sarkozy stuck to the argument that it was not his fault if wrongdoings were committed by those close to him, however much they were devoted to his cause, or acting under his authority, or using the means of the ministry he was in charge of and later those of his presidency. Regarding Claude Guéant and Brice Hortefeux, he declared: “Of course, they were devoted to me. I had total confidence in the manner in which they led their professional lives at my side […] What followed has shown that they were capable of taking initiatives on important questions of their personal lives, like their residence, without speaking to me about it, or like the choice of those they frequented, Ziad Takieddine or Thierry Gaubert, without speaking to me about it concerning Brice Hortefeux. It is not contradictory.”
He added, with reference to his qualification as a lawyer, obtained in 1980: “In criminal [law] matters – permit the lawyer to speak for a moment – I must account for that which I am personally responsible for. I don’t believe I have found a statement by Claude Guéant or Brice Hortefeux indicating that they saw Ziad Takieddine after having informed Nicolas Sarkozy or at the request of Nicolas Sarkozy. I have said, with the greatest of frankness, what I thought of the nature of their relations. But I tell you with the greatest of force that this didn’t happen at my request, nor to my information.”
That prompted the magistrates to respond: “The problem is that, whether it concerns 2005 and 2006, that’s to say the period before your election, or 2007, Claude Guéant was acting to the benefit of one person, namely you. He personally drew no benefit from this relationship with Ziad Takieddine. All of the steps he took are taken on your account, as a candidate or president.”
Sarkozy’s last comment in the transcripts was a plea: “Believe in my sincerity, I ask this of you.”
It was one hour later, at 8.52pm on October 12th, that the former president was formally placed under investigation for “criminal conspiracy”.
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- The French version of this report can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse