election funding

Every man for himself! Defendants in Sarkozy campaign funding trial seek to deflect blame

France

Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy and 13 other defendants are facing a variety of charges over the massive and illegal overspend in the ex-head of state's presidential election campaign in 2012 and the attempts to hide it. The prosecution claims that the public relations and events firm Bygmalion helped to conceal this multi-million-euro overspend by issuing fake bills for staging political rallies to Sarkozy's political party, the UMP, rather than just the election campaign itself. But Bygmalion's executives at the company and its events subsidiary have no intention of shouldering the blame for what happened. Mediapart's legal affairs correspondent Michel Deléán was in court to hear the evidence from one of them, Franck Attal.
by Michel Deléan

Death of Libyan minister linked to Sarkozy election funding 'highly suspicious'

France — Investigation

Officially Shukri Ghanem died after suffering a heart attack and falling into the River Danube where he drowned. But few people have ever believed this official version of the former Libyan oil minister's death in Vienna in April 2012. Hillary Clinton's leaked emails show that her entourage and American diplomats considered at the time that Ghanem's death was “highly suspicious”. Mediapart has also contacted an acquaintance of the former oil minister in Vienna who has raised several potential theories behind the Libyan's death, including one involving “bribes” to politicians in France, Italy – and Britain. Agathe Duparc reports from Geneva.
by Agathe Duparc