Carla Bruni has been summoned for possible indictment in the investigation into the 2020 retraction of intermediary Ziad Takieddine. The latter accused her husband Nicolas Sarkozy of having financed his 2007 presidential campaign with Libyan funds.
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A source close to the case told AFP on Saturday that the former model and singer faces prosecution for receiving stolen goods, conspiracy to swindle a witness, and corruption of Lebanese judicial personnel.
Carla Bruni could emerge from this interrogation, the date of which has not been specified, as an indictment or with the more favourable status of assisted witness.
Deceiving justice
The judicial investigation opened in May 2021 is looking into the possible attempt by a dozen protagonists in this case to deceive the French justice system 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 in early May.
Hidden telephone line
Recently, according to elements of the investigation of which AFP was aware and partly revealed by Le Parisien, the financial investigating judge in charge of the case thinks he has discovered evidence of the use of a hidden telephone line by Carla Browned.
At the beginning of December 2019, she asked her IT technician 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, the phone was then used by the former presidential couple to receive messages from the former paparazzi pope, Mimi Marchand (real name Michèle Marchand), also implicated, about the progress of the operation.
Not his phone
During her hearing in early May, Carla Bruni denied that it was her phone.
However, one of the messages seems to prove that the former First Lady had been informed in advance of Mimi Marchand’s trip to Beirut in mid-October 2020 for the famous interview in which Ziad Takieddine retracted, possibly for payment.
Carla Bruni had previously said she only knew about it when the interview was published, on November 11, 2020. “Why did you lie?” the OCLCIFF investigator asked her in early May. “Even if I knew she was going (to Lebanon), I didn’t know why,” she defends herself.
Message sent
The judge also found a message sent on this 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 assures that she does not “see at all what (Mimi Marchand) could be talking 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,” the singer reacts, rekindled. “I don’t know. Cash… Hannibal Gaddafi… We’re in a sphere where I don’t know what to tell you.”
Asked again about the elements suggesting the theory of a hidden phone belonging to her, she replied: “Absolutely. I understand. But it’s not my number.” Before adding: “I’m trying to come up with explanations.”
“Stupidly naive”
Asked to conclude, Carla Bruni said she was “stupidly naive” and added that she “felt responsible for the indictment” of her husband.
“I am the one who should be,” she claims, presenting herself as her husband’s “only contact” with Mimi Marchand, who “used her husband’s name and her own (…) to give herself weight with her cronies,” as Nicolas Sarkozy claims.
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.
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