Former President Nicolas Sarkozy is summoned by a Parisian judge for an indictment in the investigation into the retraction through Ziad Takieddine of his accusations of Libyan financing of the 2007 presidential campaign, learned the France-Presse agency Wednesday from sources familiar with the matter, confirming Liberation’s comments. According to two of these sources, the interrogation initially scheduled for these days has been postponed and should be held in October, as RTL and M6 wrote.
The former head of state, who firmly contested any participation in the incriminated facts during a twelve-hour hearing in mid-June before the financial investigators of the OCLCIFF, is suspected of having knowingly benefited from maneuvers undertaken by several protagonists to exonerate him.
Depending on the content of his statements before the examining magistrate and the assessment that the latter will make of them, the former President of the Republic could emerge from this questioning under investigation or under the less incriminating status of assisted witness, which gives him access to the file while excluding a lawsuit concerning it.
Justice suspects at least eight protagonists of having participated, with the possible endorsement of the former head of state, in an operation so that the sulphurous Franco-Lebanese intermediary Ziad Takieddine withdraws his accusations at the end of 2020, against remuneration. against Nicolas Sarkozy.
This operation would also have aimed to obtain proof that the resounding “Libyan document”, published between the two rounds of the 2012 presidential election by Mediapart and evoking financing of up to 50 million euros, was a false, or even to obtain the release of a Gaddafi son, detained in Lebanon, so that the family of the late Libyan dictator facilitates the exoneration of Mr. Sarkozy. The queen of the paparazzi Mimi Marchand is among the defendants.
At the beginning of March, the National Financial Prosecutor’s Office extended the judicial investigation opened in the spring of 2021 to facts of “concealment of witness tampering”, a qualification which could correspond to the role attributed to Nicolas Sarkozy as it appears in certain statements by the protagonists in investigation.
At the origin of this investigation, the spectacular volte-face of Ziad Takieddine, who accused Nicolas Sarkozy since 2012 of having benefited from Libyan funds for his 2007 presidential campaign, and who had declared in November 2020 on BFMTV and in Paris Match that Nicolas Sarkozy had in fact not benefited from funding from Muammar Gaddafi.
He went back on his remarks two months later. Investigators recently put at least 608,000 euros the amount of the alleged operation intended to obtain the withdrawal of the charges of Ziad Takieddine.
Asked about his busy legal agenda, Nicolas Sarkozy denounced Wednesday evening an “all-out harassment” during his appearance on the show C à vous on France 5. “I fight, I don’t lower my head”, declared the 68-year-old former president.
?? @NicolasSarkozy in the face of justice: he expresses himself in
“I will go all the way, the European Court of Human Rights,” he said of the so-called “wiretapping” case, for which he was sentenced on appeal to three years in prison. prison, one of which is closed and has lodged an appeal in cassation. Regarding his referral to court in the case of the Libyan financing of his 2007 presidential campaign, the former president said: “I am therefore accused of illegal financing by Gaddafi without after 10 years of investigation they are damn how much”. “How much is Gaddafi’s funding? 100,000, 2 million, 10 million? No, we couldn’t,” he defended himself.
“I’m clean,” replied Nicolas Sarkozy, when asked about all of these legal challenges.
