Illegal political financing: Nicolas Sarkozy expected in court on Monday

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 (2007-2012), aged 69, will be present for the opening of his trial before the Paris court, assures his entourage, who say so combative et determined to prove his innocence in the face of what he has always described as fable.

Sarkozy is accused, while he was Minister of the Interior, of having spent at the end of 2005 – notably with the help of his chief of staff Claude Guéant and former minister Brice Hortefeux – a corruption pact with the wealthy Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, who fell in 2011, so that he support financially his accession to the French presidency.

Tried for corruption, concealment of embezzlement of public funds, illegal campaign financing and criminal association, Nicolas Sarkozy faces 10 years in prison and a fine of 375,000 euros (559,000 Canadian dollars), as well as a deprivation of civil rights for up to 5 years.

I am convinced of guilt drawn hearings, witnesses, tracing of financial flows, elements of mutual assistance provided to us by 21 countriesdeclared financial prosecutor Jean-François Bohnert Monday morning on BFMTV/RMC.

Our work is not political work, he said; we only have one compass, and that is the law.

A fifth trial

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 of imprisonment, including 6 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 (the highest court in the French legal order) in this case linked to excessive spending during his lost 2012 presidential campaign.

Mr. Sarkozy 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, the Italian-born singer Carla Bruni, and their daughter.

The trial will begin with the appeal of the 12 defendants, civil parties and witnesses, before procedural questions, which should occupy the court throughout the first week.

Hearings will take place on Monday, Wednesday and Thursday afternoons until April 10. Nicolas Sarkozy will, according to his entourage present at each hearing during the first month, be devoted to suspicions of financing. Additional aspects will be discussed in the following weeks.

He will fight the artificial construction imagined by the prosecution. There is no Libyan financing of the campaigndeclared his lawyer, Me Christophe Ingrain.

Vengeance

Nicolas Sarkozy disputes everything: for him, the Libyans’ accusations are just one vengeance explained by his active support for the Libyan rebels at the time of the Arab Spring which brought down Mr. 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. However, after 10 years of investigation, a bundle of clues convinced the investigating judges.

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They 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 dead drowned in the Danube in 2012.

The supposed counterparts? First an international rehabilitation: Gaddafi was welcomed with great fanfare in 2007 by Nicolas Sarkozy, newly elected president, during a controversial visit to Paris, a first in 3 decades.

Then, there is the signing of big contracts and a legal helping hand to Abdallah Senoussi, director of Libyan intelligence sentenced to life 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 people. Around twenty relatives are civil parties to the trial.

Among the defendants is the former Budget Minister Éric Woerth, treasurer of the campaign, as well as two men from the shadows, experienced in parallel international negotiations: the discreet businessman Alexandre Djouhri and the sulphurous and versatile Ziad Takieddine, now on the run in Lebanon.

On the latter’s account were found 3 transfers from the Libyan authorities for 6 million euros (8.94 million Canadian dollars) in total, and he described suitcases given to Claude Guéant containing large denominations.