Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy will go on trial on Monday in the biggest political finance scandal in modern French history, in which he allegedly received millions of euros in illegal campaign funding from the regime of late Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.
The historic trial of the right-wing former French president and 12 others, including three former Sarkozy government ministers, for criminal conspiracy to obtain funds from a foreign dictator on a huge scale threatens to worsen already low voter confidence in the French political class.
After 10 years of investigation, the court will consider charges of what investigators called a “corruption pact” between Sarkozy and the Libyan regime, in which middlemen delivered suitcases of money to ministry buildings in Paris to illegally finance Sarkozy’s victorious 2007 presidential campaign.
If found guilty on corruption charges, Sarkozy could face up to 10 years in prison along with Claude Guéant, a former secretary-general of the Elysee Palace and interior minister, and Brice Hortefeux, a close Sarkozy ally who also served as interior minister.
The court will examine whether the Libyan regime requested diplomatic, legal and business services in exchange for funding Sarkozy’s presidential campaign. One of those alleged requests for favours concerned Abdullah al-Senussi, Gaddafi’s intelligence chief.
In 1999, a French court sentenced Senussi in absentia to life in prison for his involvement in the 1989 bombing of a Union de Transports Aériens (UTA) passenger plane over Niger that killed 170 people. The court will consider whether Tripoli has asked Sarkozy’s entourage to find a way to overturn France’s international arrest warrant for Senussi.
Laurie Heinich, a lawyer for 15 relatives of those killed in the UTA bombing, said her clients would “tell the court the truth” after learning that “the arrest of the man who killed their family members” could be “exchanged for money.” She said the alleged corruption pact would mean that “the money Nicolas Sarkozy used to get elected in 2007 was money tainted with the blood of these families.”
Sarkozy denies all allegations
Sarkozy, who was president from 2007 to 2012, denies all wrongdoing in the case.
Sarkozy’s representatives allegedly met with members of the Gaddafi regime in Libya in 2005, when the French politician was interior minister. Shortly after becoming French president in 2007, Sarkozy invited the Libyan leader on an extended state visit to Paris, who pitched his Bedouin tent in gardens near the Elysee Palace.
Sarkozy was the first Western leader to welcome Gaddafi on a full state visit since relations were frozen in the 1980s because of his pariah status as a sponsor of state terrorism. In 2011, however, it was Sarkozy who was among those Western leaders who favoured airstrikes against Gaddafi’s forces that helped rebels overthrow his regime. Gaddafi was captured by rebels in October 2011 and died an agonising death.
A documentary about the case, Personne N’y Comprend Rien (No One Understands), will be released in French cinemas on Wednesday, telling the story of the investigation.
