On April 28th 2012, Mediapart published a document written by a senior figure in Libya in 2006 which stated that the regime of Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi - who was overthrown and assassinated in 2011 - approved payment of 50 million euros to back Nicolas Sarkozy's 2007 presidential election campaign.
The letter, dated December 10th 2006, said that the regime had agreed to support Sarkozy’s campaign for the “sum of fifty million euros”. The letter also stated that an agreement on “the amount and method of payment” had been reached at a meeting two months earlier involving Brice Hortefeux, a longstanding close personal and political ally of Sarkozy’s.
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The publication of the document followed a lengthy series of investigations by Mediapart into the dealings between Sarkozy and his close entourage with the Gaddafi regime during the preparations for his bid for the presidency. After publication of the document in April 2012, Sarkozy lodged a complaint against Mediapart for ‘forgery and use of forgery’. After a subsequent police investigation found no grounds for the complaint, Sarkozy last year lodged a lawsuit as a civil party against Mediapart, again for ‘forgery and use of forgery’ which, under French law, automatically triggered a judicial investigation.
Meanwhile, the evidence suggesting that the former president’s 2007 election campaign was partly funded by Gaddafi is the subject of a judicial investigation led by judges Serge Tournaire and René Grouman.
Earlier this month, Sarkozy, defeated in presidential elections in 2012 after serving five years in office, announced his return to active politics, beginning with his bid for the leadership of the conservative UMP opposition party, paving the way for his attempted return to the presidency in elections due in 2017. The Gaddafi funding allegations represent one of a series of investigations which pose a major threat to Sarkozy, and he and his allies have dismissed the document published by Mediapart as a fabrication. “About Libya, the judges know that the documents are false,” said Sarkozy in an interview with French weekly JDD on September 21st, when he detailed his political comeback.
However, Mediapart can reveal that the investigation has received testimony from numerous expert witnesses who point to the genuine nature of the 2006 letter. They were interviewed by the French gendarmerie’s Paris criminal investigation unit (the section de recherches de Paris), appointed by the magistrates to verify the document’s authenticity.
In a report dated July 7th this year, the gendarmerie presented a summary of its findings, notably the testimony received from members of the diplomatic corps and military officials who were consulted. “In the unanimous opinion of the people consulted, the document published by Mediapart presents all the characteristics of the form of documents produced by the Libyan government of that period, with regard to the typography, the dating [method], and the style used,” concluded the gendarmerie investigators. “Furthermore, the Libyan institutional [way of] functioning suggested in the document is not manifestly unrealistic.”
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On August 5th this year, judges Tournaire and Grouman travelled to Qatar to question Moussa Koussa, whose signature appears on the document published by Mediapart and who now lives, after fleeing Libya, in Doha. Koussa was head of the Libyan foreign intelligence services under Gaddafi, before he became the dictator’s foreign affairs minister in 2009.
Koussa told the French magistrates that he did not sign the document. “The contents are not false, but the signature is false,” he said under questioning. “It is not me who signed.”
Asked what was not false in the document, Koussa answered: “Its origins, its contents, that’s what,” he answered. “The contents of this document, that’s what is dangerous. It’s for you to know if it’s true or false. I didn’t tell you whether it was false or not. There is what is mentioned in this document and someone who has put a false signature underneath, for you to investigate.”
But Koussa also told the French judges that the document was drawn up by Baghdadi Ali al-Mahmudi, who was at the time secretary general of Libya’s General People's Committee, equivalent to the post of prime minister.
The first paragraph of the document reads: “With reference to the instructions given by the liaison office of the General People's Committee concerning the approval of support for the electoral campaign of the candidate Monsieur Nicolas Sarkozy for the presidential elections, to the sum of fifty million euros.”
During the questioning in August, Koussa testified: “Mahmoudi made the document, who [sic] left after the revolution.” Mahmoudi held the post of prime minister until he fled Libya for Tunisia after the Gaddafi regime’s collapse in 2011. Koussa continued: “You ask me what elements I have to implicate him, it’s because we lived together, I mean by that that I knew him very well. You ask if I have elements to implicate him. Yes, I have, but don’t include me into this story.”
It appears from Koussa’s answers that the document was established by the highest authorities of the Libyan state. Mahmoudi, who was in 2012 extradited from Tunisia back to Libya where he is now in detention, has himself told the Tunisian justice authorities that he coordinated the payment of a part of the funds approved for Sarkozy. The document published by Mediapart announcing the “agreement in principle”for the payment to Sarkozy of 50 million euros was addressed to Bashir Saleh, Gaddafi's chief-of-staff and also then president of the Libyan African Portfolio (LAP), one of the main investment arms of the regime which was partly used for corruption campaigns around the world.
Koussa also told the French investigators who brought a copy of the document with them that it was the first time he had seen it.
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When he was asked to recognise his signature as it appeared on official papers requesting a French residency permit that he obtained in June 2008, and another that appears on documents requesting its renewal in April 2011, he said that these also were not his signatures.
The gendarmerie investigations into the authenticity of the document published by Mediapart were also focussed on technical aspects. On March 25th this year, the gendarmerie questioned Patrick Haimzadeh, a former French military officer who served as a councillor for military affairs at the French embassy in Tripoli between 2001 and 2004. He is also the author of a recognised book of reference about the Gaddafi regime, published in France under the title Au cœur de la Libye de Kadhafi (At the Heart of Gaddafi’s Libya’).
“The green colour is that of the Libyan Jamahiriya,” Haimzadeh said in his statement, “as is also the logo and the typography used in the body of the text. It is the ‘kufic’ [Editor’s note: a calligraphic form of Arab script] both concerning the addressee and the title of the signatory.”
“The first date is that of the Gregorian calendar with the symbol ‘f’ corresponding to the sign used in Libya since 2000 to designate the Christian calendar,” Haimzadeh explained in his statement. “The second corresponds to the Libyan calendar used since 2000, a solar calendar that contains the same number of days as the Gregorian calendar. The numbers of the months and days are therefore the same, the only change being the number of the year because this calendar begins from the death of the prophet Muhammad, which is why the two letters follow the date 1374, which are abbreviations for ‘after the death of the prophet’. I confirm that the dates are coherent in both their correspondence and the evocation of the two calendars. All documents of this sort have only these two dates [...] Libyan documents for internal affairs were systematicallypresented with these two dates.”
“Then comes the register number which appears to me to be coherent,” Haimzadeh continued. “I note that at the bottom right of the paper appear symbols and initials that probably designate addressees from within the service.”
Haimzadeh said he thought the Libyan move to make such a payment was plausible. “According to the practices of Gaddafi, which I described in my book, it was usual to provide financial support to other countries, entities, a president or opposition groups, notably African,” he said. “The strategic objective of G. [Gaddafi] was the rapprochement with Europe, and France in particular. I am therefore not surprised regarding the Libyan side, but I cannot comment on the reception of such support on the part of the French side.”
Another witness interviewed this summer by the gendarmerie was Jean-Guy Pérès, a former French police commissaire divisionnaire, equivalent in Britain to a chief superintendent. Between 2005 and 2008, Pérès internal security attaché at the French embassy in Tripoli. “It entirely resembles official documents used by Libya regarding the text and the typography [...] The formulations are very similar to what I used to receive,” he said in his statement dated June 30th. Even on as sensitive a subject, the fact that this document exists does not surprise me, the Libyans being very formal and bureaucratic. They put everything into writing.”
Véronique Vouland-Aneini was First Councillor of the French embassy in Tripoli, also between 2005 and 2008. In a statement to the gendarmes, dated March 21st, she also assessed the authenticity of the document published by Mediapart. “The Arabic seems to me to be of a very good technical level, and corresponds with an administrative document of this nature.,” she said. “Official Libyan documents did indeed include several dates […] In its general aspect, this could correspond with a Libyan document.”
French air force lieutenant colonel Bruno Vrignaud was defence attaché at the French embassy in Tripoli from 2004 to 2007, and now works in military intelligence. “The text, typography and the formulations are very similar,” he told the gendarmes in a statement on June 27th. He said he was surprised at the absence of a mention of where the meeting referred to in the document took place. However he concluded that “the existence of something in writing and an account of the conclusions of a meeting, even in these circumstances, does not surprise me”.
Meanwhile, in January this year the former French ambassador to Libya between 2008 and 2011, François Gouyette, was questioned by magistrates leading a separate investigation into Nicolas Sarkozy’s official complaint against Mediapart for ‘forgery and use of forgery. In his statement, Gouyette said “it could be a genuine document”. He also recounted two discussions he had held with former close aides to Gaddafi and who confirmed to him that Libya had funded Sarkozy’s campaign.
One of these Gouyette described as a leading official whose name he declined to divulge to avoid “negative consequences” for the source. “Before leaving Libya, I had a conversation with a Libyan contact who had belonged to Gaddafi's inner circle, to which he no longer belonged at that time, and so I asked him the question to find out [...] if he had heard talk of this financing that [Gaddafi’s son] Saif al-Islam talked about, and this person told me that it was something that was known among those close to the Libyan government, and that there had indeed been funding of M. Sarkozy's presidential campaign,” said the ambassador in his statement, adding that his source had not given details “either of the amounts nor of the practical details”, he told the judges.
The second source Gouyette spoke to was Gaddafi’s former interpreter, Moftah Missouri, with whom he discussed the subject of the campaign funding at the end of 2011. “He told me that to his knowledge there had indeed been funding, that the money had been paid by Libya,” Gouyette told the magistrates.
In an interview in 2013 with France 2 public broadcaster’s current affairs programme Complément d’enquête, Missouri said millions of dollars were involved. “Even Gaddafi told me, verbally, that Libya had paid some 20 million dollars. Normally, here, at the presidency, when one gives money to someone there is no bank transfer, there's no cheque, it's cash in briefcases,” Missouri told the programme.
The interpreter had also commented on the document revealed by Mediapart in April 2012, which he said was “the outline document, if I dare say so, for the financial support of the presidential campaign of President Sarkozy”. He added: “It's a genuine document.”
In December 2013 the TV programme’s director Romain Verley confirmed Missouri's comments to police officers assisting the investigation. “He authenticated the document,” Verley told them. “He confirmed that it was a plan for funding. He told us that in a very assertive manner. He re-read it in Arabic, he re-translated it and confirmed its veracity.” Questioned about the checks that France 2 had carried out on the document, Verley said he had “contacted several [of our] sources in order to verify if the document was or was not genuine”. He concluded: “All our sources confirmed the authenticity of the document.”
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The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse