Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy was indicted this Friday on two new charges related to the investigation into the alleged illegal financing of the election campaign that took him to the Elysee Palace in 2007 with money from Muammar Gaddafi’s Libyan regime, judicial sources reported. After 30 hours of interrogation that began last Tuesday, two new charges were brought against the former French president from 2007 to 2012: attempting to influence a key witness and fraud by an organized gang.
These two accusations pave the way for a new trial against Sarkozy, who has already been convicted twice of influence peddling and illegal financing of the 2012 presidential campaign, both cases which the former president has appealed. In addition, another trial is due in early 2025 over the financing of his 2007 election campaign with Libyan money. It was precisely from this investigation that this new branch emerged, known in France as the Takieddine case, in reference to the Franco-Lebanese mediator at the origin of the allegations against Sarkozy of receiving Libyan money.
The new charges added today come as judges have received evidence that the former president, along with other defendants, was involved in various extortion schemes against Ziad Takieddine in order to exonerate him. An action that allegedly led the mediator to change his official version and withdraw the allegations against Sarkozy in a television interview at the end of 2020.
Takieddine, who is currently outside France, then again accused Sarkozy of receiving money from the Libyan regime, which is keeping the case against him ongoing for the illegal financing of his 2007 election campaign, in which he failed in the second round against the Socialists Segolène Royal. In parallel, in the first half of 2021, several people tried to forge a Libyan document published by the digital media Mediapart that proved that Sarkozy had received around 50 million euros from Gaddafi. To achieve this, the accusation goes, Sarkozy’s emissaries tried to corrupt judicial personnel in Lebanon, where one of the late Libyan dictator’s sons is being arrested, in order to secure his release with the aim of refuting the allegations against the former president.
In his various statements to investigators published by the newspaper Libération, Sarkozy has denied all the allegations made against him, although there is evidence that he had appointments and telephone conversations with other defendants at the time of the events, which he attributes to coincidence
In 2021, Sarkozy became the first former French president to be sentenced to a harsh prison sentence for corruption, one year for influencing a judge, a sentence that was upheld on appeal last May and which is still pending an appeal in the Supreme Court. In September 2021, he was again sentenced to one year in prison for illegally financing his 2012 election campaign, which he lost to Socialist François Hollande.
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