A new judicial front is opened for former French president Nicolas Sarkozy (2007-2012). The Frenchman has been indicted by the investigating judges on two new charges within the investigation into the financing by the Libyan regime of his 2007 presidential campaign. In this case he is accused of having participated in the alleged maneuvers to free him from the suspicions.
He is accused of covering up witness tampering, specifically that of Franco-Lebanese businessman Ziad Takieddine, who in an interview in 2020 retracted the accusations he had initially made against Sarkozy, in which he accused him of having received Libyan money for his campaign. . It is suspected that the businessman changed his version supposedly in exchange for money.
Sarkozy has been testifying before the judges since Tuesday within the framework of this investigation. In addition to witness tampering, he is accused of participating in a criminal association with a view to committing the crime of judicial fraud in an organized gang. There are nine other people charged in the case.
It is one more leg of the plot of illegal financing of his 2007 campaign, the one that took him to the Elysée. The judges believe that there is sufficient evidence to believe that Sarkozy was informed of the maneuvers that were being carried out to exonerate him. One of the accused even gave this operation a name: “Save Sarkozy.”
It is just one of the processes in which it is involved. The other is the wiretapping case, also called the Bismuth case, which reveals an alleged pact between Sarkozy and his longtime lawyer to buy off the then prosecutor of the Court of Cassation, also with the aim of whitewashing him.
Sarkozy has been convicted twice of corruption, but has appealed the sentences. Last May, the former president’s judge ratified the three-year prison sentence for corruption and influence peddling in this wiretapping case, but appealed to the Court of Cassation.
This is now the only judicial trick that Sarkozy has left to avoid conviction. If the Court ratifies it, he would be the first president sentenced to an effective prison sentence. His predecessor in office, Jacques Chirac, was sentenced for embezzlement, but only to two years and exempt from serving.
In November the former president will also be tried for another matter, the so-called Bygmalion case, which investigates the illegal financing of his electoral campaign, in this case that of 2012. These are the elections that he lost to François Hollande. This also earned him a year in prison in the first instance and he also appealed.
