According to Jean-François Bohnert, guest on BFMTV-RMC this Monday January 6 as the trial of Libyan financing of the 2007 campaign opens, a “corruption pact” between the Sarkozy clan and the Libyan authorities of the time was also discovered.
“Everything I say is documented by the file.” On BFMTV-RMC this Monday, January 6, the opening day of the trial in the case of alleged financing by Libya of Nicolas Sarkozy's 2007 presidential campaign, Jean-François Bohnert, prosecutor of the national financial prosecutor's office, insisted that the work of the investigating judges, which “lasted nearly 10 years”, had made it possible to trace “financial flows.”
“Today we have on file proof that a total amount of six million euros left Libyan public funds and arrived in France through intermediaries,” he said.
According to Jean-François Bohnert, these funds then disappeared “because they arrived most of the time in cash, or in any case were the subject of transfers via offshore zones.”
“Triangulation”
The prosecution believes that the “corruption pact” was established in the fall of 2005 in Tripoli, under the tent of Muammar Gaddafi, known for being very generous with his foreign visitors.
On BFMTV-RMC, Jean-François Bohnert confirms this thesis of the “corruption pact”, between “on one side a candidate for the presidential election, Nicolas Sarkozy, those close to Nicolas Sarkozy, and on the other side the authorities Libyan forces, at the head of which is still Colonel Gaddafi.”
“It is in this triangulation that the corruption pact will take place in the sense that money will be promised by the Libyan authorities to Nicolas Sarkozy and his relatives to support and finance the electoral campaign,” he adds. .
The prosecution was unable to establish an exact total amount of the alleged financing. But after 10 years of investigation, a “body of evidence” convinced the investigating judges of the existence of this financial support.
Counterparties
The magistrates relied in particular on the declarations of seven former Libyan dignitaries, the discreet trips to Libya of Claude Guéant and Brice Hortefeux, suspicious transfers or the notebooks of the former Libyan Minister of Oil Choukri Ghanem, found drowned in the Danube in 2012.
The supposed counterparts? First an international rehabilitation: Gaddafi will be welcomed with great fanfare by Nicolas Sarkozy, newly elected president, during a controversial visit to Paris, the first in three decades.
But also the signing of major contracts and a legal helping hand to Abdallah Senoussi, director of Libyan intelligence sentenced to life imprisonment in his absence in France for his role in the attack on the UTA DC-10 in 1989, which cost the lives of 170 people including 54 French. Around twenty relatives are civil parties to the trial.
