Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy has gone on trial in Paris, accused of taking tens of millions of euros of illicit funds from the late Libyan chief Col Muammar Gaddafi to finance his 2007 election marketing campaign.
In trade, the prosecution alleges Sarkozy promised to assist Gaddafi fight his fame as a pariah with Western international locations.
Sarkozy, 69, was the president of France from 2007 to 2012.
He has at all times denied the fees, saying they have been introduced in opposition to him by folks with motivations to convey him down.
The investigation was opened in 2013, two years after Saif al-Islam, son of the then-Libyan chief, first accused Sarkozy of taking tens of millions of his father’s cash for marketing campaign funding.
The next 12 months, Lebanese businessman Ziad Takieddine – who for a very long time acted as a intermediary between France and the Center East – stated he had written proof that Sarkozy’s marketing campaign bid was “abundantly” financed by Tripoli, and that the €50m (£43m) price of funds continued after he grew to become president.
Twelve different folks – accused of devising the pact with Gaddafi – are standing trial alongside Sarkozy. All of them deny the fees.
Sarkozy’s spouse, Italian-born former supermodel and singer Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, was charged last year with hiding evidence linked to the Gaddafi case and associating with wrongdoers to commit fraud, each of which she denies.
Since shedding his re-election bid in 2012, Sarkozy has been focused by a number of legal investigations.
He additionally appealed in opposition to a February 2024 ruling which discovered him guilty of overspending on his 2012 re-election campaign, then hiring a PR agency to cowl it up. He was handed a one-year sentence, of which six months have been suspended.
In 2021, he was discovered responsible of making an attempt to bribe a decide in 2014 and have become the primary former French president to get a custodial sentence. In December, the Paris appeals court docket dominated that he might serve his time at home wearing a tag as an alternative of going to jail.
Sarkozy was not carrying the tag as he arrived in court docket in Paris on Monday morning.
Nonetheless, that’s solely as a result of the main points of that sentence have but to be labored out.
It’s seemingly that in the middle of this three-month trial over the so-called Libya connection, the previous president will seem carrying the machine.
The trial is ready to proceed till 10 April. If discovered responsible, Sarkozy faces as much as 10 years in jail.
