Former French President Sarkozy Faces Trial Over €50M Campaign Financing Scandal Involving Libya’s Gaddafi
Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy will stand trial on Monday in the biggest political finance scandal in France's modern history. The prosecution alleges that he received millions of euros in illegal funding for the 2007 election campaign from the regime of the late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi.
Following a 10-year anti-corruption investigation, the court will hear allegations of what investigating magistrates have called a ‘corruption pact’ between Sarkozy and the Libyan regime. According to the pact, intermediaries delivered suitcases full of cash to the ministry's buildings in Paris to illegally finance Sarkozy's 2007 presidential campaign.
The historic trial has been launched not only against the right-wing former French president, but also against 12 other people, including three former government ministers. The court is accusing them of criminal conspiracy to receive funds from a foreign dictator on a large scale.
The court will examine whether the Libyan regime requested diplomatic, legal and business services in exchange for funding Sarkozy's presidential campaign. For example, one of the alleged requests for favours concerned Abdullah al-Senussi, Gaddafi's head of intelligence and security. Senussi was previously 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 the Libyan regime allegedly asked Sarkozy's entourage to find a way to cancel France's international arrest warrant for Senussi.
The lawyer for the victims' relatives stressed that the alleged corruption deal would mean that “the money Nicolas Sarkozy used to get elected in 2007 was money tainted with the blood of these families”.
The three-month trial reveals Sarkozy's complex relationship with Gaddafi, the autocratic Libyan leader whose brutal 41-year rule was marked by human rights abuses. The dictator has been isolated internationally because of his regime's links to terrorism, including the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie in Scotland in December 1988.
Sarkozy, who was president between 2007 and 2012, denies all wrongdoing in the case.
However, the trial threatens to worsen the already low voter confidence in the French political class.