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.
A source close to the matter told AFP on Saturday that the model and singer faces prosecution for concealment of witness tampering, criminal association with a view to preparing trial fraud by an organized gang and with a view to corruption of Lebanese judicial personnel.
Carla 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 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 ex-president was indicted in October, suspected of having approved these maneuvers. In April, his lawyers filed a motion to overturn this measure and, recently, a request to disorient 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.
A telephone line that intrigues
Recently, according to elements of the investigation of which AFP was 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. At the beginning of December 2019, she asked her IT specialist “a new line completely disconnected from the rest”He subscribed to this subscription in his name the same month.
For the judge, the telephone would have been used in particular by 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. One of the messages, however, 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-Sarkozy had previously said that she only found out when the interview was published on November 11, 2020. “Why did you lie?” the OCLCIFF investigator asks him in early May. “Even though 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 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 “everything is fine”. Carla Bruni-Sarkozy assures that she “I don’t see at all what (Mimi Marchand) is 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 yes yes”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.” Asked again about the evidence suggesting that she had a hidden phone, she replied: “Absolutely. I understand. But it’s not my number.”“Before adding: ‘I’m trying to come up with explanations’.”
Asked to conclude, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy said to herself “stupidly naive” and adds “feel responsible for the indictment” from her husband.
“It’s me who should be,” she asserts, presenting herself as her husband’s “only contact” with Mimi Marchand, who “used (her) husband’s name and (her) (…) to give yourself weight with your friends.”as Nicolas Sarkozy claims. Mimi Marchand, she continues, “is clever, but not necessarily in the truth. She is very manipulative”When contacted, the singer’s lawyer, Paul Mallet, did not respond to AFP.
