by MARTIN BARNAY
‘If you want to be a great politician, you need great troubles; petty troubles are for petty politicians.’ So declared Nicolas Sarkozy in 2018, leaping to the defence of his protégé Gérald Darmanin – now Macron’s justice minister, then facing several rape accusations. By his own metric, Sarkozy sits comfortably among the greats of the Fifth Republic. This Thursday, the former president appeared before a Paris magistrates’ court to hear the verdict in his corruption trial, accused of taking millions – perhaps as many as fifty – from Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya to bankroll his 2007 presidential campaign.
The proceedings were of rare magnitude: more than a decade of investigation, thirteen defendants including the former head of state, three of his ministers and a handful of high-flying middlemen. A sizeable crowd turned out for the occasion – two courtrooms filled to capacity, with an overflow auditorium showing the session on a giant screen. Among the defendants, Sarkozy sat beside his childhood friend and former Minister for National Identity Brice Hortefeux; behind them, in the public benches, were Sarkozy’s wife, Carla Bruni, and three sons, including Louis, a twenty-something New York University graduate and rising star of France’s populist right. Opposite sat representatives of the Libyan state, a civil party in the case, joined by anti-corruption NGOs and families of the victims of UTA Flight 772, brought down over the Ténéré desert, a bombing attributed to Gaddafi’s intelligence services. Conspicuously absent was Ziad Takieddine, the fixer long accused of serving as the main conduit of Libyan funds to Sarkozy’s circle. He had died two days earlier in the city of Tripoli, Lebanon, where he was evading an arrest warrant – ‘a bitter coincidence’, remarked the presiding magistrate.
When the sentences came down, they were heavy. Alexandre Djouhri, the Franco-Algerian power broker once thought untouchable, was given six years in prison with an immediate committal order. Sarkozy received five years, with incarceration deferred: he has a few weeks to turn himself in, though at seventy his age makes him eligible for special consideration, to be determined on appeal in six months’ time. At some 400 pages, the judgement is a landmark ruling. Sarkozy stands convicted of criminal conspiracy, with the court affirming that between 2005 and 2007 his entourage maintained clandestine contacts with the Libyan regime. But he was acquitted of the charge of illegal campaign financing: while investigators identified suspect flows of money from Libya, they were unable to prove conclusively that the funds in question had reached the ex-president. The court also dismissed a document long central to the case – a purported note from Gaddafi’s foreign minister Moussa Koussa, dated December 2006, pledging €50 million for Sarkozy’s campaign. First published by Mediapart in 2012, the document was putatively found amid a trove of Takieddine’s personal papers supplied to the press by his ex-wife.
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