Carla Bruni-Sarkozy is summoned for possible indictment in the investigation into the 2020 retraction of intermediary Ziad Takieddine, who accused her husband Nicolas Sarkozy of having financed his 2007 presidential campaign with Libyan funds.
According to a source close to the case told AFP on Saturday, the model and singer faces prosecution for receiving stolen goods, conspiracy to commit fraud in court as part of an organized gang and corruption of Lebanese judicial personnel.
Ms. Bruni-Sarkozy could emerge from this interrogation, the date of which has not been specified, indicted or under the more favorable status of assisted witness.
The judicial investigation opened in May 2021 looks at the possible attempt by a dozen protagonists in this case to deceive French justice in the Libyan case, the main part of which will be judged in early 2025.
The former president was indicted in October on suspicion of having approved these maneuvers. In April, his lawyers filed a request to have this measure annulled and, recently, a request to transfer the investigation.
His wife has already been interviewed twice by investigators from the Central Office for the Fight against Corruption and Financial and Tax Offenses (OCLCIFF): first as a witness in June 2023, then as a suspect at the beginning of May.
– Telephone line –
Recently, according to elements of the investigation of which AFP has become aware and partly revealed by Le Parisien, it is a telephone of the former pope of the paparazzi, “Mimi” Marchand (real name Michèle Marchand), also implicated, which has come to increase the charges against the 56-year-old artist.
The financial investigating judge in charge of the case believes he has found evidence of Ms. Marchand’s use of a hidden telephone line, which she disputes.
At the beginning of December 2019, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy asked her IT specialist for “a new line completely disconnected from the rest”. He signed up for this subscription in her name the same month.
According to the judge, Mimi Marchand sent messages to the former presidential couple via this cell phone.
One of them seems to prove that the former First Lady was informed in advance of Ms. Marchand’s trip to Beirut in mid-October 2020 for the famous interview in which Mr. Takieddine retracted, possibly for payment.
Ms Bruni-Sarkozy had previously said that she only found out when the interview was published on 11 November 2020.
“Why did you lie?” the OCLCIFF investigator asked her in early May. “Even though I knew she was going (to Lebanon), I didn’t know why,” she defended herself.
– “Very manipulative” –
The judge also found a message sent on this famous secret line two weeks before the first wave of arrests in the case, in June 2021: Mimi Marchand announces that “a friend came home last night” and that “Everything is fine”.
Carla Bruni-Sarkozy assured that she does not “see at all what (Mimi Marchand) can talk about”.
The investigator recalls that this message follows by a few hours the trip to Germany of two protagonists in the case to hand over funds that could have been used to bribe Lebanese magistrates to get one of Gaddafi’s sons, Hannibal, out of prison so that he could help exonerate Nicolas Sarkozy.
“Oh my,” reacts Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, relaunched. “I don’t know. Cash… Hannibal Kadhafi… We are in a sphere where I don’t know what to tell you.”
Asked again about the elements suggesting the theory of a phone belonging to her, Mrs Bruni-Sarkozy replied: “Absolutely. I understand. But it’s not my number.” Before adding: “I’m trying to come up with explanations.”
Asked to conclude, Mrs Bruni-Sarkozy said she was “stupidly naive” and added that she “felt responsible for the indictment”.
“It’s me who should be,” she asserts, presenting herself as her husband’s “only contact” with Mimi Marchand, who “used my husband’s name and mine (… ) to give himself weight with his friends”, as Nicolas Sarkozy asserts.
Mimi Marchand, she continues, “is clever, but not necessarily truthful (…) She is very manipulative.”
When contacted, the singer’s lawyer, Paul Mallet, did not respond to AFP.
