The former French president Nicolas Sarkozy will go on trial on Monday over the biggest political financing scandal in modern French history, in which he is alleged to have received millions of euros in illegal election campaign funding from the regime of the late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi.
The historic trial of the rightwing former French president and 12 other people – including three former government ministers – for criminal conspiracy to receive funds from a foreign dictator on a massive scale threatens to worsen voters’ already low trust in the French political class.
After a 10-year anti-corruption investigation, the court will hear allegations of what investigative magistrates called a “corruption pact” forged between Sarkozy and the Libyan regime in which intermediaries delivered suitcases full of cash to ministry buildings in Paris to illegally fund Sarkozy’s victorious 2007 presidential campaign.
The court will examine whether, in exchange for funding Sarkozy’s presidential campaign, the Libyan regime requested diplomatic, legal and business favours.
One of these alleged requests for favours related to Abdullah al-Senussi, Gaddafi’s spy chief and enforcer. Senussi had been sentenced in absentia to life imprisonment by a French court in 1999 for his role in the 1989 bombing of a UTA passenger plane over Niger which killed 170 people. The court will hear how requests were allegedly made by the Libyan regime to Sarkozy’s entourage to find a way to lift France’s international arrest warrant against Senussi.
But in 2011, Sarkozy put France in the forefront of Nato-led airstrikes against Gaddafi’s troops that helped rebel fighters topple his regime. Gaddafi was captured by rebels in October 2011 and killed.
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.
If convicted on corruption charges, Sarkozy could face up to 10 years in prison alongside Claude Guéant, a former Élysée secretary general and interior minister, and Brice Hortefeux, a close Sarkozy ally who also served as interior minister. All deny wrongdoing.
Members of Sarkozy’s entourage allegedly met members of Gaddafi’s regime in Libya in 2005, when Sarkozy was interior minister. Soon after becoming French president in 2007, Sarkozy then invited the Libyan leader for a lengthy state visit to Paris, setting up his Bedouin tent in gardens near the Élysée. Sarkozy was the first western leader to welcome Gaddafi on a full state visit since the freeze in relations in the 1980s over his pariah status as a sponsor of state terrorism.
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