A new trial for Nicolas Sarkozy: the former French president must answer from Monday and for four months, alongside three former ministers, to accusations of illegal financing of his 2007 campaign by Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya. The former head of state will be present for the opening of his trial at 1:30 p.m. before the Paris court. Those around him say he is “combative” and “determined” to prove his innocence in the face of what he has always described as a “fable”.
He is accused, while he was Minister of the Interior, of having entered into a “corruption pact” at the end of 2005 with the wealthy Libyan dictator, so that he would “financially support” his accession to the French presidency. Tried for corruption, concealment of embezzlement of public funds, illegal campaign financing and criminal conspiracy, Sarkozy faces ten years in prison and a fine of 375,000 euros, as well as deprivation of civil rights (therefore ineligibility) of up to ‘at five years old.
“I am convinced of guilt” drawn from “hearings, witnesses, tracing of financial flows, elements of mutual assistance which were provided to us by 21 countries”, declared the financial prosecutor Jean-François Bohnert Monday morning on BFMTV/RMC. “Our work is not political work. We only have one compass, it is the law,” he added. This is the fifth trial in five years of the former right-wing president.
Sarkozy was sentenced at first instance and on appeal for illegal campaign financing to one year’s imprisonment, including six months under an electronic bracelet, an unprecedented sanction for a former head of state in France. He filed an appeal before the Court of Cassation in this case linked to excessive spending during his lost presidential campaign in 2012. The ex-president does not yet wear an electronic bracelet, it could take several weeks. Which allowed him to spend the Christmas holidays in the Seychelles with his wife Carla Bruni and their daughter Giulia.
“He will fight the artificial construction imagined by the prosecution. There is no Libyan financing of the campaign,” declared his lawyer, Me Christophe Ingrain. Sarkozy denies everything: for him, the Libyans’ accusations are only “revenge” explained by his active support for the Libyan rebels at the time of the Arab Spring which brought down Gaddafi, killed in October 2011. 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.
Sarkozy was then an ambitious and highly publicized minister thinking about the presidential election. His visit to Libya was officially devoted to illegal immigration. The prosecution was unable to establish an exact total amount of the alleged financing. But after ten years of investigation, a “cluster of clues” convinced the investigating judges.
The supposed counterparts? First an international rehabilitation: Gaddafi will be welcomed with great fanfare in 2007 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 for Abdallah Senoussi, director of Libyan intelligence sentenced to life imprisonment for his role in the attack on the UTA DC-10 in 1989.
