Former President Nicolas Sarkozy is accused of having benefited from Libyan funding for the 2007 presidential campaign. But this case, like Russian dolls, gives life to many others. The Parisian judges are particularly interested in the retraction of the Franco-Lebanese Ziad Takieddine and suspect several actors, including Nicolas Sarkozy, of having paid him for his silence, explains Release, who announces Monday evening the future indictment of the ex-head of state.
According to the newspaper, Nicolas Sarkozy must be summoned and indicted for “tampering with a witness”. The investigations on the Libyan file were opened after the publication by Mediapart, in 2012, between the two rounds of the presidential election, of a document supposed to prove that the victorious campaign of Nicolas Sarkozy five years earlier had been financed by the regime of Muammar Gaddafi.
Sarkozy knew that Takieddine was going to retract
After repeating several times that he had acted as an intermediary in this illegal financing, Ziad Takieddine withdrew his charges in November 2020. The businessman however claimed to have handed over suitcases of money and five million euros between the end of 2006 and the beginning of 2007 to the former president, then interior minister, and his chief of staff, Claude Guéant.
Already questioned about Ziad Takieddine’s change of speech, Nicolas Sarkozy denied the accusations en bloc during three free hearings on June 13 and 14. Release claims, however, that the ex-president admitted to having been aware of the retraction of the main witness before it was made public. The former president has many court appointments to come. His trial in the Bygmalion case will begin on November 8 and he will also have to appear in early 2025 in the vast Libyan case, in which he was sent back to corrections.