The verdicts and sentencing pronounced on Thursday in Paris over the roles of 11 defendants, notably including France’s former president Nicolas Sarkozy, marks the end of almost 15 years of investigations by Mediapart into the alleged secret funding of Sarkozy’s 2007 presidential campaign by the dictatorial regime of Muammar Gaddafi.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
During the ten years of the judicial investigations, which were launched in 2013 under the authority of successive judges before they were wound down in 2023, political careers have been ended, some ambitious and seemingly powerful high-flyers have crash-landed, while several key witnesses have gone on the run or have died. The latest death, announced just two days ago, was that of Paris-based Franco-Lebanese business intermediary, Ziad Takieddine, 75, a key player in the contacts between Sarkozy’s team and the Libyans, and who gave damning evidence against Sarkozy (which he later retracted seemingly against payment from individuals working in support of the former French president).
Takieddine’s funeral was due to be held in the Lebanon (to where he had fled in 2020 from France) on Thursday, when his own legal fate would have been pronounced.
The trail of the judicial probe and Mediapart’s investigations is a long and winding one: at times it appeared stuck in a rut, at others fired-up by new evidence. On the downside, it has faced highly complex financial investigations involving tax-haven structures around the world, the chaos of the collapse of the Gaddafi regime in the summer of 2011, witnesses on the run and, not least, the evidence-erasing effects of the passage of time.
From small beginnings, vast scandals do grow
Between 2005 and 2007, Sarkozy served as interior minister, while preparing to launch his bid to replace fellow conservative Jacques Chirac as France’s president in elections due in the spring of 2007. The Gaddafi regime, meanwhile, had begun seeking to normalise its relations with the West, after years of isolation as a rogue state.
Sarkozy had a small, dedicated team to help organise his plans to run in the presidential election, encouraged by opinion poll results. One requirement was money, and their attention turned to Tripoli where one of the team, Ziad Takieddine, had contacts. Takieddine then worked those contacts in liaison with Claude Guéant. Another in the team was Brice Hortefeux, a childhood friend of Sarkozy’s, who was to play a key part in liaising with the Libyans alongside Guéant.
Sarkozy was comfortably elected as president in May 2007. Seven months later, in December, Gaddafi was given a lavish welcome in Paris after being invited for a five-day visit.
It was in July 2011 that Mediapart first reported the funding suspicions after obtaining access to confidential documents drawn up by Takieddine, working hand-in-hand with Sarkozy’s longstanding right-hand man (and in 2011, interior minister) Guéant.
In 2013, a judicial investigation was launched. It stemmed from a complaint filed by Nicolas Sarkozy against Mediapart for having published, in April 2012, an official Libyan document approving the unblocking of regime funds to be paid into Sarkozy’s campaign. Sarkozy accused Mediapart of publishing a forgery and of the “publication of false information”. Despite expert evidence given to magistrates confirming the authenticity of the document, Sarkozy tried almost every legal opportunity at his disposal to attack Mediapart but failed. In January 2019, seven years on, his defamation case was definitively thrown out by France’s highest appeal court, the Cour de Cassation.
The judicial probe that would eventually lead to the trial of Sarkozy at the beginning of this year, on charges of corruption, criminal conspiracy, receipt of the proceeds of the misappropriation of public funds, and illegal campaign financing, alongside 11 other defendants accused of various related corruption charges, was in fact prompted by Mediapart’s revelations, and notably that of the Libyan document published in 2012. It noted that the “agreement in principle” to fund Sarkozy’s campaign was recorded in the “minutes” of a meeting held on October 6th 2006 in the presence of, on the French side, close Sarkozy ally Brice Hortefeux and middleman Ziad Takieddine. During this meeting “an agreement was concluded to determine the amount and method of payment”.
In early May 2012, shortly after the Libyan document, signed by Gaddafi’s foreign intelligence chief Moussa Koussa, was published by Mediapart, Baghdadi Ali Mahmoudi, a former Libyan prime minister under Gaddafi from 2006 to 2011, spoke to Mediapart via his lawyer from Tunisia, where he was detained after fleeing Libya. “I confirm that there does exist a document signed by Moussa Koussa and that financing had indeed been received by Mr Sarkozy,” read his statement.
In early 2014, France’s former ambassador to Libya, François Gouyette, told the investigating magistrates that two of his Libyan contacts claimed knowledge of the Sarkozy funding deal. One was the dictator’s former translator and interpreter, Moftah Missouri, who later went public with his allegations, and the other a person who the diplomat described as being within Gaddafi’s inner circle, and whose name he would not publicly disclose.
It was in July 2015 that one of the most imaginative statements was given to police to camouflage Libyan payments. This concerned the discovery by police that Claude Guéant had received a sum of 500,000 euros onto his French bank account in 2008. Denying it had any Libyan connection, Guéant insisted the money came from the sale of two oil paintings by a 17th-century Dutch artist. Yet art experts said the two paintings were worth nowhere near 500,000 euros which was sent him from the far-east.
In March 2022, a Paris appeal court confirmed that the 500,000-euro sum had been paid through a complex money trail that led back to a sovereign wealth fund ultimately controlled by Gaddafi, a Paris appeal court has confirmed. The payment was made when Guéant was secretary general of the Élysée Palace.
Gaddafi's chief of staff when the Libyan document was drawn up, in December 2006, was Bashir Saleh, then president of the Libyan African Portfolio (LAP), one of the main investment arms of the regime. Saleh, who was referred to as being present at the October 2006 meeting with Guéant and Takieddine, was in charge of supervising the payments.
After the fall of the Gaddafi regime in 2011, France helped Saleh to flee the country, allowing him to settle in France. But in April 2012, with Mediapart's publication of the Libyan funding document, and while he was the object of an Interpol ‘wanted’ red alert for his arrest and extradition back to Libya where he faced fraud charges, Alexandre Djouhri, a businessman close to Sarkozy’s chief of staff Claude Guéant organised Saleh’s rapid flight from France for South Africa. A judicial investigation established in 2015 that Djouhri was helped in the operation by Sarkozy’s domestic intelligence chief, Bernard Squarcini.
Takieddine provided further surprises in November 2016 when he described, in a filmed interview for Mediapart, how he brought to Paris three suitcases of cash from Libya to give to Nicolas Sarkozy, via Claude Guéant, shortly before the 2007 presidential elections. He said the total cash amount was 5 million euros.
By 2018 the legal net began closing in fast on Sarkozy and his acolytes. Djouhri was extradited to France from the UK. Sarkozy, Guéant, Takieddine and Éric Woerthe, Sarkozy’s 2007 election campaign treasurer, were formerly placed under investigation. That same year, Bashir Saleh, exiled in South Africa, told a French TV current affairs programme that Sarkozy did indeed receive Libyan cash.
The judicial investigation continued to round up the missing links of such a complex investigation, during which time Sarkozy and his former team found themselves placed under investigation over ever deeper suspicions. (In France, a suspect can be placed under investigation by a magistrate only if there is “serious and/or corroborating” evidence that they committed a crime. Charges are brought only at the end of an investigation, if they are sent for trial.)
It was in August 2023 that the magistrates and prosecutors reached a conclusion. “After ten years of investigation, judges have decided that there is sufficient evidence to send former French president Nicolas Sarkozy to stand trial in the affair concerning the alleged illegal Libyan financing of his 2007 election campaign,” Mediapart reported. “The investigating judges are also sending three of the ex-president's ministers for trial in the same affair: Claude Guéant, Brice Hortefeux and Éric Woerth […] this is an unprecedented situation in French political and legal history.”
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- This report is largely based on Mediapart's chronology of the main events of the Gaddafi-Sarkozy funding affair, which can be found in French here.