Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy will be tried on Monday for the biggest political financing scandal in modern French history, in which he allegedly received millions of euros in illegal election campaign financing from the deceased’s regime Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi.
The historic trial of France’s right-wing former president and 12 others – including three former ministers – for criminal conspiracy to receive massive funds from a foreign dictator threatens to worsen voters’ already low confidence in the class French politics.
After 10 years of anti-corruption investigation, the court will hear allegations about what investigating judges called a “corruption pact” between Sarkozy and the Libyan regime under which intermediaries delivered suitcases full of money to ministry buildings in Paris to illegally finance Sarkozy’s victory. 2007 presidential campaign.
The court will examine whether, in exchange for financing Sarkozy’s presidential campaign, the Libyan regime requested diplomatic, legal and commercial favors.
One of these alleged requests for favors concerned Abdallah al-Senussi, the head of intelligence services and Gaddafi’s enforcer. Senussi was sentenced in absentia to life imprisonment by a French court in 1999 for his role in the 1989 bombing of a UTA airliner over Niger, which killed 170 people. The court will hear how the Libyan regime allegedly asked Sarkozy’s entourage to find a way to lift France’s international arrest warrant against Senussi.
Laure Heinich, a lawyer for 15 relatives of people killed in the UTA plane attack, said her clients would tell the court of their shock at learning that “the arrest of the person who killed the members of their family” could be “exchanged for money”. According to her, the alleged corruption pact would mean that “the money used by Nicolas Sarkozy to get elected in 2007 was money stained by the blood of these families”.
Sarkozy, who was president between 2007 and 2012, has denied any wrongdoing in the affair.
The trial, which will last three months, will expose Sarkozy’s complex relationship with Gaddafi, the autocratic Libyan leader whose 41 years of brutal rule were marked by human rights abuses and who had been isolated internationally due to of his regime’s links to terrorism, including the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland in December 1988.
Members of Sarkozy’s entourage reportedly met with members of Gaddafi’s regime in Libya in 2005, when Sarkozy was interior minister. Shortly after becoming French president in 2007, Sarkozy then invited the Libyan leader for an extended state visit to Paris, setting up his Bedouin tent in the gardens near the Élysée. Sarkozy was the first Western leader to host Gaddafi on a state visit since relations were frozen in the 1980s over his pariah status as a sponsor of state terrorism.
But in 2011, Sarkozy put France at the forefront of NATO-led airstrikes against Gaddafi’s troops, which helped rebels topple his regime. Gaddafi was captured by rebels in October 2011 and killed.
A documentary on the case, Nobody Understands Nothing (Nobody understands), will be released on Wednesday in French cinemas and will tell the story of the investigation.
If convicted of corruption, Sarkozy faces up to 10 years in prison alongside Claude Guéant, former secretary general of the Élysée and interior minister, and Brice Hortefeux, a close ally of Sarkozy who also served as Minister of the Interior. All deny wrongdoing.
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Sarkozy’s former Budget Minister, Éric Woerth, now a deputy for Emmanuel Macron’s centrist party, is also on trial. He denies any wrongdoing.
In March 2011, Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, Gaddafi’s son, told Euronews: “Sarkozy must return the money he accepted from Libya to finance his election campaign. We financed his campaign and we have proof… The first thing we demand is that this clown returns the money to the Libyan people.”
Chanez Mensous, of the anti-corruption group Sherpa, who is a civil party to the trial, said: “This case gives us a very clear vision of what transnational corruption is today and its implications. We do not emphasize enough the damage caused to civilian populations, particularly to the Libyan population, because this involves embezzlement of Libyan public funds.”
Sarkozy already has two legal convictions. Last month, France’s highest court upheld a verdict against him for corruption and influence peddling following illegal attempts to curry favor with a judge. He was ordered to wear an electronic badge for a year, a first for a former head of state. He is challenging this decision before the European Court of Human Rights.
In another trial, Sarkozy was found guilty of covering up illegal excessive spending during the 2012 presidential election, which he lost to socialist candidate François Hollande. He appealed.
Fabrice Arfi, an investigative journalist for the Mediapart site, which revealed the affair in 2011, said the scale of the corruption accusations in the Libyan case would be an “electric shock” for French society. “The whole image of France is at stake,” he declared. “People will discover the compromising behavior of a former president and his team with a terrible dictator, on the diplomatic, economic, judicial and financial levels.”
theguardian