By Golineh Djananpour, Brussels
The final phase of the trial in the “Libyan Financing Affair of Nicolas Sarkozy’s 2007 Presidential Campaign” is underway. The trial is set to conclude on April 10. If the suspicions of financial crime prosecutors—who have been investigating for over ten years—prove correct, this would be the biggest political scandal the country has seen in decades. In fact, nothing like this has ever happened before.
The prosecution’s thesis, summarized in three sentences, is as follows: Nicolas Sarkozy allegedly received millions from Muammar Gaddafi, the Libyan ruler—a pariah of the West, a rogue. In return, Gaddafi was said to have expected Sarkozy to push him back onto the international stage, grant him lucrative business deals, even a nuclear power plant, and secure his convicted brother-in-law’s release from legal troubles. In 2011, during the Arab Spring, Sarkozy allegedly facilitated Gaddafi’s downfall—personally advocating for an international military intervention with jets and targeted bombings. Did he want to ensure that the Libyan ruler, along with all his secrets, would go down for good?
The prosecution accuses Sarkozy and eleven others of forming a criminal organization driven by a “pact of corruption.” The dozen defendants are primarily French and Libyan. If the court reaches the same conclusion in a few weeks, no absolute proof is needed—merely a solid chain of circumstantial evidence suffices in corruption cases. Sarkozy faces up to ten years in prison and a fine of 375,000 euros.
Sarkozy is currently wearing an electronic ankle bracelet on his left ankle after being convicted in another trial a few weeks ago for attempting to bribe a judge. He recently stated that this only makes him stronger and that he will fight until the very end.
Without the investigative journalists from Mediapart, an independent French investigative platform, this trial likely would never have taken place. The key documents in this case, the crucial financial transactions—almost all of it comes from them. Sarkozy never wanted to engage with Mediapart—not once in all these years since the publication began its investigations in 2012. Instead, he flooded them with lawsuits. He calls them “crooks” whose sole aim is to drag him through the mud, even if it means using forged documents. That is how he sees himself—as a victim. So far, Mediapart has won every lawsuit he has filed against them. Sarkozy, in turn, accuses the judiciary of scrutinizing his entire life, traveling halfway around the world for evidence, and suddenly finding resources they usually claim not to have: “For me, there’s always enough—just for me,” Sarkozy says sarcastically.
Sarkozy now stands in the defendant’s dock, alongside his former associates and confidants who are also on trial. Brice Hortefeux, whom he has known since they were 21 and 18 years old, respectively, has been like a “brother” to him. Sarkozy will abandon him in this trial. Then there’s Claude Guéant, now 80 years old, visibly aged. Guéant, a former high-ranking civil servant, prefect, and interior minister, was Sarkozy’s most important right-hand man. He managed Sarkozy’s election campaign and later became his secretary-general at the Élysée—a classic behind-the-scenes power broker.
Sarkozy was initially a highly popular interior minister before setting his sights on the highest office in the country. He reinvented the role—always following the same, effective playbook. Whenever something happened—a murder, a riot in the banlieues—he would rush to the scene, trailed by TV cameras, delivering tough talk into the microphones. He rode the waves of public emotion like a master. Once, he declared that the banlieues needed to be “cleaned up with a Kärcher” (a high-pressure cleaner) to wash away the “scum.” A conservative politician using the rhetoric of the far right—Sarkozy was a populist before the term became trendy.
“Sarko” was so popular that he was the leading contender to succeed Jacques Chirac, who had been president from 1995 to 2007. Guéant, his chief of staff, and Hortefeux, his minister for regional affairs, were his closest allies. Both traveled to Tripoli and met with Abdallah Senoussi—Guéant in October, Hortefeux in December—without the French embassy being informed. No one was supposed to know.
Senoussi was Gaddafi’s brother-in-law, head of intelligence, the regime’s number two. Most importantly, he was the mastermind behind the Libyan terrorist attacks that made the country a global pariah. He was allegedly responsible for the bombing of UTA Flight DC-10 over the Ténéré Desert in Niger on September 19, 1989—killing 170 people, including 54 French citizens. France’s judiciary sentenced Senoussi in absentia to life in prison. He could no longer leave Libya—effectively imprisoned in his own country. For the Gaddafi clan, overturning this conviction was an obsession.
The Paris prosecutor’s office is now convinced that Guéant and Hortefeux met with Senoussi to discuss this aspect of the “corruption pact.” The secret meetings were reportedly arranged by a flamboyant businessman—one of those shadowy dealmakers France has always had: Ziad Takieddine, a Franco-Lebanese well-connected in all circles of power. A few months later, Takieddine was caught carrying suitcases full of cash—once in Geneva, once at Paris-Le Bourget airport. Both times, he was returning from Libya.
Guéant and Hortefeux must now explain to the court—and to the many relatives of the DC-10 victims sitting in courtroom 2.01—why they secretly met with Senoussi, a convicted terrorist. No security detail was informed; only Takieddine was present as a translator. Both co-defendants tell exactly the same story, as if scripted: they knew nothing about the meeting, they were “lured into a trap,” an “ambush.” And because they were so embarrassed afterward, they supposedly never told Sarkozy about the encounter upon returning to Paris. Guéant was in Libya in October 2005, Hortefeux in December. In between, Sarkozy himself traveled to Tripoli.
Sarkozy now believes that Guéant and Hortefeux made a mistake, that it was inappropriate to “collude” with Takieddine, as he puts it. But, he insists, this has nothing to do with him. He never liked Takieddine—found him unpleasant and creepy. “I’m not a criminal,” he once said loudly. Is he trying to make it seem as if Guéant and Hortefeux went to Libya on their own initiative, as if they pulled off a shady deal behind his back? Yet they were there for him.
Claude Guéant also has to explain to the court how he came into possession of 500,000 euros in the years after his trip to Libya, transferred from a Malaysian account. The French press calls it the “story of the Flemish paintings.” Guéant claims that he once bought two small paintings by Andries van Eertvelt, a 17th-century Belgian artist: seascapes, marine paintings, ships in a storm. Purchase price: around 50,000 euros.
In the fall of 2007, when Sarkozy was already president, Guéant says he attended an event at a luxury hotel in Paris, hosted by the Malaysian ambassador. There, he met a Malaysian lawyer who was eager to buy the paintings—without ever having seen them—for half a million euros, ten times their value.
The Malaysian ambassador told investigators that she had never met Guéant and had not been posted in Paris for a year by that time. No trace of the Malaysian lawyer exists. Guéant’s housekeeper said she had never seen these paintings. The prosecution therefore assumes that the money originated from Libya, was funneled through a Saudi account to Malaysia, and from there to Paris. It was used to purchase an apartment in the 16th arrondissement, on Rue Weber. Guéant had already signed the purchase contract and made a down payment of 500,000 euros before the money had even arrived.
The Libyan dictator had not been to Paris for thirty years—he was unwelcome, a prince of terror. But now he was received with great pomp, accompanied by more than a hundred people. Gaddafi was even allowed to pitch his Bedouin tent in the garden of the Hôtel de Marigny, directly across from the Élysée Palace. And since he liked it so much, he stayed a few extra days, disregarding protocol. The French were puzzled. Sarkozy met with a delegation to calm public opinion. And Gaddafi was now officially back on the international stage, rehabilitated by Sarkozy. Was this part of the deal?
In the spring of 2011, when the Arab Spring reached Libya, Sarkozy abruptly reversed course, making a sudden break with Gaddafi. He was the first Western leader to call for the end of Gaddafi’s rule. That’s when Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, the dictator’s son, appeared on television, claiming that Libya had financed Sarkozy’s election campaign and that Sarkozy should return Libya’s money. Few took him seriously—wasn’t this just the ruling family lashing out against their downfall? Against the very man who was working hardest to bring them down? That had always been Sarkozy’s line of defense.
But then the diary of Shukri Ghanem, Libya’s former prime minister and oil minister, surfaced—disproving the idea that this was merely Libyan retaliation.
In an entry from 2007—years before the Arab Spring—Ghanem wrote about a conversation with Bashir Saleh, Gaddafi’s finance chief and head of a Libyan sovereign wealth fund. “At noon, I had lunch with Baghdadi and Bechir Saleh at Bechir’s estate,” Ghanem noted. “Bechir said he had sent Sarkozy 1.5 million euros, and al-Islam had given Sarkozy three million euros. But they were later told the money never arrived. It seems that ‘certain people’ skimmed off the funds—two million from Abdallah Senoussi as well.”
The Dutch police found the diary during a raid investigating Libyan bribery payments, in the home of Ghanem’s son-in-law. Shukri Ghanem himself had died under mysterious circumstances in April 2012—his body was found floating in the Danube in Vienna.
The Paris court is also interested in Bashir Saleh, Gaddafi’s “treasurer” and a co-defendant in the trial. The French considered him so valuable that, after the dictator’s fall in late 2011, they exfiltrated him from Libya—military jargon for a covert extraction—and brought him to France. Reportedly by helicopter, then by navy vessel, and even rumors suggest a French submarine.
For a while, Saleh lived in Paris undisturbed, strolling through the city. Until Interpol issued a warrant for his arrest. This was bad timing for Sarkozy—he was in the middle of his re-election campaign. The first round of voting had already taken place, and the talk of Libyan millions was hurting his chances.
The trial is taking a toll on Sarkozy, the longer it drags on. At one point, he admits, “I know there is serious circumstantial evidence, but it doesn’t fit together.” He used to say the case was empty. Now, he acknowledges there are “serious indications.” Do they form a solid chain of evidence? Could this really be all there is?
