Carla Bruni-Sarkozy is summoned for possible indictment in the investigation into the retraction in 2020 of the intermediary Ziad Takieddine, who accused her husband Nicolas Sarkozy of having financed his 2007 presidential campaign with Libyan funds, a t -we learned this Saturday June 29 from a source close to the matter.
According to this source, the model and singer faces prosecution for receiving stolen goods, criminal conspiracy to prepare fraudulent trials as part of an organized gang, and for the corruption of Lebanese judicial personnel. The 56-year-old artist could emerge from this interrogation, the date of which has not been specified, under formal investigation or with the more favorable status of assisted witness.
The judicial investigation opened in May 2021 is looking into the possible attempt by a dozen protagonists to deceive the French justice system in the Libyan case, the main part of which will be judged in early 2025. An operation that had been dubbed “Save Sarko”, the aim of which was to obtain a change of version from Ziad Takieddine in 2020, which had exonerated the head of state.
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.
Hidden telephone line
The wife of the former head of state has already been questioned twice by investigators from the Central Office for the Fight against Corruption and Financial and Fiscal Offenses (OCLCIFF), first as a witness in June 2023, then as a suspect in early May.
Recently, according to elements of the investigation of which AFP has become aware and partly revealed by the Parisian, the financial investigating judge in charge of the case believes he has discovered evidence of the use of a hidden telephone line by Carla Bruni-Sarkozy. For the judge, the telephone would have been used in particular for the ex-presidential couple to receive messages from the ex-paparazzi priestess, Mimi Marchand (real name Michèle Marchand), also implicated, on the progress of the ‘operation.
During her hearing in early May, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy denied that it was her phone. She said «feel responsible» of the indictment of her husband. “It’s me who should be indicted,” she said, accusing Mimi Marchand of having “used the name of [son] husband and [sien] in this affair to give himself weight with his friends. Mimi Marchand, she continued, “is clever, but not necessarily true. […] She is very manipulative.” When contacted, the singer’s lawyer, Paul Mallet, did not respond.
