The chairman of the National Assembly's powerful finance committee, Éric Woerth, has been placed under formal investigation by judges for his role in the affair involving Libyan funding of Nicolas Sarkozy's successful 2007 presidential election campaign. Woerth, who is being probed for “collusion in illicit financing of an election campaign”, was campaign treasurer and faces claims he concealed a large influx of cash in the campaign accounts.
Former president Nicolas Sarkozy has already been placed under investigation – which is one step short of charges being brought – for “illicit funding of an electoral campaign”, “receiving and embezzling public funds” and “passive corruption”.
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At this stage of the investigation there is no evidence that conservative Member of Parliament Woerth, who became budget minister under President Sarkozy, was aware of the Libyan origin of the cash funds. But as treasurer he was duty bound not to submit false accounts to the authorities.
Woerth, who like Sarkozy denies any wrongdoing, was questioned on May 16th, 2017, by officers from the anti-corruption squad OCLCIFF, and acknowledged the existence of undeclared cash during the campaign – something he had denied during the Bettencourt affair in which he was involved. But he said that the amounts involved were relatively small and did not exceed 40,000 euros.
However, this claim does not tally with other claims made during the investigation, which is being led by judges Serge Tournaire, Aude Buresi and Clément Herbo. A number of helpers on the Sarkozy campaign have given evidence that they saw large envelopes of cash. One witness even spoke of “hundreds of envelopes” in a safe.
According to the police investigation, virtually everyone in the campaign team received large denomination notes, even though this never appeared in the official accounts submitted by Nicolas Sarkozy. A former member of the headquarters campaign team said that not only did the secretaries get hidden payments but so too did the campaign “bosses”. The envelopes given to senior figures were “a lot bigger than the ones we got”, said the witness.
When he was questioned last year, Éric Woerth, said he “thought” that the cash “came from people who wanted to help and who didn't want to be revealed”. He insisted: “I didn't have the information to work out where these funds came from. This money annoyed me, it was more of a nuisance than a gift from on high. We thought about destroying it or giving it to charity.”
As Mediapart has already reported, Woerth's explanations were considered to be “specious” by investigators, designed to deceive. In fact one accountant at the UMP – the name of the main conservative party at the time - said it was unlikely that the large denomination notes came from supporters' donations. Others completely demolished Woerth's claims about the cash coming via the post. “I never saw mail arriving which contained cash,” the UMP's head of postal services said.
In a summary report written by officers from OCLCIFF on September 5th, 2017, they referred to “the lack of honesty in the campaign accounts” of 2007 and “the amount of cash circulating on the edges of the campaign”.
The report also spoke of the material factors supporting the “suspicions of Libyan funding”, in particular the suitcases full of money carried by middleman Ziad Takieddine between 2006 and 2007. Takieddine, himself already under investigation in the affair, has confessed to delivering a total of 5 million euros from Tripoli to Sarkozy and his then chief of staff Claude Guéant. “The members of the campaign team who have acknowledged having received cash and who recall the face values of the notes spoke of large denominations,” said the authors of the police report. “These assertions were confirmed by Éric Woerth. It seems worthwhile noting that, according to his own declarations, the suitcases delivered by Ziad Takieddine to Messrs Guéant and Sarkozy also contained large denomination notes.”
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Claude Guéant, who was in charge of Nicolas Sarkozy's 2007 campaign having been his chief of staff at the Ministry of the Interior, rented a strongroom from the BNP bank at its branch in the Opéra area of central Paris during the 2007 election. He visited it seven times between March 23rd and July 19th, 2007.
When he was questioned by police officers, Guéant insisted that he had rented the strongroom – which was big enough for a man to stand up in – in particular to store Nicolas Sarkozy's speeches. This explanation was greeted with laughter by many former campaign team members. The investigating judges have said they want to question Guéant this June.
Following the news that Éric Woerth had been placed under investigation, MPs from the conservative Les Républicains – the successor party to the UMP to which he belongs - issued a statement supporting the finance committee chairman. “In the face of this new ordeal imposed on him, the Les Républicains MPs, knowing Éric Woerth's integrity as well as his sense of public interest, unanimously reiterate their confidence and support and show their affection for him,” the statement said.
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- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter