the essential
Carla Bruni-Sarkozy is summoned by the courts 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.
Carla Bruni-Sarkozy soon to be indicted? The singer, ex-model and wife of Nicolas Sarkozy, is soon to be summoned by the courts. She could emerge from her summons as an indicted person or with the more favorable status of assisted witness. The date of the summons is not known.
Carla Bruni-Sarkozy faces prosecution for receiving stolen goods, conspiracy to commit fraud in court as part of an organized gang and corruption of Lebanese judicial personnel.
The judicial investigation opened in May 2021 is looking into the possible attempt by a dozen protagonists in this case to mislead the French justice system in the Libyan case, the main part of which will be tried in early 2025. The former president was indicted in October, suspected of having approved these maneuvers. In April, his lawyers filed a request to have this measure annulled and, recently, a request to relocate the investigation. His wife has already been heard 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.
Charges against Carla Bruni-Sarkozy
Recently, according to elements of the investigation and partly revealed by Le Parisien, it was a telephone of the former paparazzi pope, “Mimi” Marchand (real name Michèle Marchand), also implicated, which came 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 Michèle Marchand’s use of a secret telephone line, which she denies.
At the beginning of December 2019, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy asked her IT specialist for “a new line completely disconnected from the rest”. He takes out this subscription in his name the same month. For the judge, Mimi Marchand would have sent messages via this cell phone to the ex-presidential couple. One of them seems to prove that the former First Lady was 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-Sarkozy 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.
“Very manipulative”
The judge also found a message sent on this famous occult 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) 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 dear”, reacts Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, revived. “I don’t know. Cash… Hannibal Gaddafi… We’re in a sphere where I don’t know what to tell you.” Again questioned about the elements suggesting the thesis of a telephone belonging to her, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy replies: “Quite. I understand well. But it’s not my number.” Before adding: “I’m trying to put together explanations.” Asked to conclude, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy says she is “stupidly naive” and adds that she “feels 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 gain weight with his cronies”, as Nicolas Sarkozy asserts. Mimi Marchand, she continues, “is clever, but not necessarily truthful […] She is very manipulative.” When asked, the singer’s lawyer, Me Paul Mallet, did not respond.
