A Paris court is to rule whether the former French president Nicolas Sarkozy is guilty of receiving millions of euros in illegal election campaign funding from the regime of the late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, in the biggest political financing scandal in modern French history.
Judges will deliver their verdict on Thursday after the state prosecutor recommended a seven-year jail term for Sarkozy, who went on trial with 12 other people – including three former government ministers – accused of criminal conspiracy to receive funds from a foreign dictator. Sarkozy and the other accused have denied wrongdoing.
It is the biggest corruption trial faced by Sarkozy, 70, who was France’s rightwing president from 2007 to 2012. He has already been convicted in two separate cases: one for corruption and influence peddling over illegal attempts to secure favours from a judge, and another for hiding illegal overspending in the 2012 presidential election that he lost to the Socialist candidate, François Hollande. He has appealed against both convictions.
The three-month trial in Paris heard allegations of what investigative magistrates called a “corruption pact” forged between Sarkozy and the Libyan regime in which intermediaries allegedly delivered suitcases full of cash to ministry buildings in Paris to illegally fund Sarkozy’s 2007 presidential campaign, which was successful.
In return for the money, the court heard, the Libyan regime requested diplomatic, legal and business favours: it was understood that Sarkozy would rehabilitate Gaddafi’s international image, prosecutors said. The autocratic Libyan leader, whose brutal 41-year rule was marked by human rights abuses, had been isolated internationally over his regime’s connection to terrorism, including the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie in Scotland in December 1988.
In 2007, the newly elected Sarkozy hosted Gaddafi in Paris – the first western leader to welcome him on a full state visit since the freeze in relations in the 1980s over his pariah status as a sponsor of state terrorism.
The buildup to the verdict took a twist this week with the sudden death in Beirut of the Franco-Lebanese businessman Ziad Takieddine, who in 2016 told the investigative website Mediapart in a filmed interview that he had helped deliver suitcases of cash from Gaddafi to Sarkozy’s entourage.
An unnamed family source told Agence France-Presse Takieddine had been in prison in Lebanon over a financial dispute and died in hospital after a heart attack.
Takieddine had been among the accused in the Sarkozy-Libya illegal campaign funding case, but he was under an international arrest warrant and was tried in absentia as he had taken refuge in his native Lebanon, which does not extradite its citizens.
In 2020, Takieddine retracted his incriminating statement about transporting suitcases of cash in the Libya case.
Shortly afterwards, Takieddine contradicted his own retraction. Sarkozy and his wife, the singer and former model Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, and several others have been placed under formal investigation on suspicion of putting pressure on a witness over the retraction. They all deny any wrongdoing.
The most emotional moments of Sarkozy’s trial were when the former president was confronted by families of the victims of the 1989 Libya-sanctioned bombing of a UTA passenger plane over Niger, which killed 170 people.
The families accused Sarkozy of seeking personal gain and betraying their loved ones through his alleged dealings with the Libyan regime. The son of one of the plane’s pilots told Sarkozy: “Imagine being in front of a coffin that was almost empty, being in front of a box and being told, ‘That’s dad’.”
Abdullah al-Senussi, Gaddafi’s spy chief and enforcer, was sentenced in absentia to life imprisonment by a French court in 1999 for his role in the 1989 plane bombing. The court heard 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.
The daughter of an actor and theatre director killed in the attack said she was four years old when her father died in the bombing, and she had struggled to understand that she would never see him again. “I spent hours in bed as a teenager asking, why me? It’s so unfair,” she said, as Sarkozy, sitting a metre away from her, stared at the ground.
She said she felt “anxiety and surprise” when Gaddafi was invited on a state visit to France in 2007 after Sarkozy was elected president, but “trusted our institutions”. Now, she said, it was agonising to hear discussion in court of whether officials in Sarkozy’s entourage met Senussi in Libya in 2005, despite his conviction for killing her father and a further 169 people.
The woman said: “I’m here because I can’t stay silent.” She said she wanted to know if these French officials “decided justice was negotiable”. She said she would rather “stay home with my hands over my ears” but was in court because she had lost trust in politicians and wanted to know the truth.
Sarkozy said in court of the families: “I respect and I understand their pain … and their anger. I can say to each person here that I never betrayed them.” He said he never “compromised” the families of the victims “for any pact or realpolitik”.
