How former French president Sarkozy allegedly received millions from Libya's Gaddafi
The trial of former French president Nicolas Sarkozy came to a close this week, ending three months of exhaustive examination of allegations that the right-wing politician had struck a bargain with Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi to finance his 2007 bid for office. It’s a story with all the makings of a seedy spy thriller – and one that won’t reach its conclusion until September.
If any criminal trial needed an hour-and-forty-three-minute film breaking down the case in patient and painstaking detail, it was this one. Two days after the trial of France’s former right-wing president Nicolas Sarkozy opened in January this year, the allegations were already being untangled in cinemas across the country with the release of a documentary co-produced by French investigative outlet Mediapart, “Personne n’y comprend rien” – Nobody Understands Anything.
With the trial coming to a close this week, the picture is starting to become clearer. Sarkozy has been accused of having sealed a “corruption pact” with the late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi that allegedly poured tens of millions of euros into financing Sarkozy’s successful bid for the nation’s highest office in 2007.
If found guilty, Sarkozy – already the first former French head of state to wear an ankle monitor in connection to an earlier, and unrelated, conviction for influence-peddling – is facing seven years in prison, a fine of 300,000 euros and a five-year ban from running for public office.
The three judges have a great deal of work ahead of them. The files that they will have to examine fill some 70 volumes. In those pages, the prosecution has painted a picture of wide-reaching corruption that, if proven, would show that the leader of the oil-rich state had poured millions into Sarkozy’s presidential campaign in exchange for the future head-of-state’s full backing in bringing the internationally isolated regime back into the brotherhood of nations.
Sarkozy has flatly denied the allegations against him, and his defence team has insisted that for all its talk of illicit millions, the prosecution has been unable to produce direct evidence of the funds in question. The trial involves 11 other defendants, including three former ministers. The court will rule on the case on September 25.
Where to begin? A former Libyan oil minister found drowned in the Danube, a lavish Bedouin tent rising in the shadow of the Élysée Palace, a Parisian bank vault the height of a man allegedly empty but for Sarkozy’s campaign speeches – it’s a case that at times seems more fit for a Hollywood screenplay than the pages of a legal dossier.
For the family members of the victims of twin terrorist attacks believed to have been sponsored by the Gaddafi regime, the story begins in flames. In 1988, a bomb planted on a Pan Am flight exploded in the skies above the town of Lockerbie in Scotland, killing 270 people from almost two dozen countries.
The next year, a suitcase bomb smuggled onto a plane flying over Niger killed 170 people, including 54 French nationals. French and US investigations declared the attacks to have been sponsored by the Libyan government. The attacks cemented Libya’s status as a pariah state in the eyes of the Western world, with the UN imposing widespread sanctions on Gaddafi’s government following his refusal to hand over two Libyan nationals implicated in the Lockerbie bombing.
Read more: Gaddafi’s son Saif doubles down on Sarkozy funding claim, alleges pressure to retract
The family members of a handful of the people killed in the sky over Niger appeared at Sarkozy’s trial in January as civil parties, testifying to the sense of “betrayal” and “contempt” that they felt upon hearing the allegations that the former president’s close associates had met with Libyan head of military intelligence Abdullah al-Senussi, Gaddafi’s brother-in-law and the alleged mastermind behind the attack.
Testifying at Sarkozy’s trial, Nicoletta Diasio, whose father was killed in the bombing, said she was asking herself if the memory of those who were killed in the bombing could have been used as bargaining chips during those discussions.
“What did they do with our dead?” she asked.
'Trapped'
This, at least, is the case that prosecutors are making: that in October 2005, Claude Guéant, who worked as Sarkozy’s chief of staff during his time as interior minister, was introduced to Senussi in Libya by French-Lebanese arms dealer Ziad Takieddine. Over the course of a dinner, the prosecutors allege, the two men struck a bargain in which Sarkozy would lift the arrest warrant targeting the spy chief – he’d been sentenced in absentia to life in prison by a French court in connection to the Niger bombing – and push for closer diplomatic and economic ties between the two countries.
Then, in December, prosecutors alleged, it was the turn of Sarkozy’s close friend and political ally Brice Hortefeux to meet Gaddafi’s brother-in-law. Leaving a dinner in his honour early – and his security detail – Hortefeux met with Senussi at the spy chief’s house in Tripoli, with Takieddine translating. At this meeting, prosecutors say, the junior minister provided Senussi with a bank account number that would allow Gaddafi and his clan to hold up their end of the bargain.
Both Guéant and Hortefeux have maintained that they had been “trapped” into surprise meetings with Senussi, and that they told no one about it – not the French embassy in Libya, nor the French government, and certainly not Sarkozy. Both men have fiercely denied having agreed to have Senussi’s arrest warrant lifted in return for campaign funding. When pressed on what he’d discussed over his intimate dinner with Senussi, Guéant said that the two men had “chatted”.
The personal diary of Chukri Ghanem, Gaddafi’s former oil minister, has been more eloquent. Found in his son-in-law’s house in Vienna after Ghanem’s drowned body was fished out of the Danube, the notebook explicitly spells out separate payments made by Senussi and Gaddafi’s associates to Gaddafi to Sarkozy – adding up to millions of euros in total. The payments appear to match transfers made to Takieddine’s bank account in Geneva.
Senussi, who is currently imprisoned in Libya on war crime charges, told French investigating judges that Sarkozy’s campaign had received millions from the Gaddafi regime.
Takieddine, for his part, said that he personally and repeatedly brought suitcases packed with millions of euros from Senussi to Sarkozy and Guéant – up to 5 million all told. The defence maintains that Takieddine used the Libyan regime’s money to finance his lavish Paris lifestyle.
Takieddine in 2020 abruptly recanted his previous confessions, leading to allegations that Sarkozy and his associates had bought the arms dealer off. Both Sarkozy and his wife Carla Bruni-Sarkozy are being investigated, alongside a dozen other figures, for suspected involvement in Takieddine’s sudden change of heart.
Broken trust
For most French people, the story starts a little later – with Gaddafi’s lavish visit to Paris in December 2007, just weeks into Sarkozy’s first – and only – term in office. Having declared his willingness to dismantle his nuclear weapons programme and pay compensation to the victims of the two plane bombings, the Libyan leader was sloughing off the sanctions that had dogged him for decades and deepening ties with the West.
Sarkozy was one of the first to welcome Gaddafi with open arms, inviting the flamboyant leader to quite literally pitch his tent in the grounds of the guest residence near Paris’s Élysée Palace – a sprawling, heated pavilion inspired by Libya’s traditionally nomadic Bedouin people.
The burgeoning friendship would prove short-lived. In 2011, Libya was swept up in the wave of popular uprisings that swept the Arab world. As Gaddafi moved to violently suppress the protests, Sarkozy quickly lent his support to the rebel groups, calling for NATO to intervene. Broken by Western bombs, Gaddafi’s regime collapsed, and the leader himself was lynched in the street by rebel groups. Soon, Sarkozy was striding through the streets of Tripoli, dwarfed by cheering crowds.
Read more: Sarkozy and Gaddafi: a blueprint for buying influence?
Just how the judges rule on Sarkozy’s case in September could cast that scene in a very different light – and strike another blow against already crumbling public trust in France’s political institutions. His trial closed soon after another Paris court sentenced far-right leader Marine Le Pen to a prison term and a five-year ban on running for office for embezzling European Union funds.
Giovanni Capoccia, professor of comparative politics at the University of Oxford’s department of politics and international relations, said that the allegations against Sarkozy were unlikely to impact the French public’s view of their political leaders – though not, he said, for the most inspiring reasons.
“The case of Sarkozy I think confirms a certain level of distrust in political parties,” he said. “In France, the level of trust for political parties and therefore the political class is below 20 percent, meaning more than 80 percent do not trust political parties. So I don't think that the extra cases – Sarkozy as you know is being tried for several different things – I don't think that that moves that dial that much. It's already very low, and it was already low even before this new trial of Sarkozy. So it’s old news in a certain sense.”
