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Former President Nicolas Sarkozy was at the pinnacle of French politics for just five years, but left a long and lurid trail of corruption allegations behind him.
Eight years after retiring from politics, the man known as the “hyper-president” remains influential, a trusted advisor to President Macron who turned to the fiery right-winger when his centrist liberalism wilted under attack from Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party. “The right haven’t found anyone to replace him,” was how one insider put it.
Yet this pillar of the French state was under house arrest and wore an ankle tag, following a conviction for attempting to bribe a judge.
In a separate case he was accused of a vast overspend in his unsuccessful 2012 presidential campaign.
But these and other scandals are dwarfed by the Libyan campaign finance saga: the charge that he sealed a corruption pact with the late Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi to obtain millions of euros in cash for his 2007 presidential campaign.
He was sentenced to five years in prison on Thursday for criminal conspiracy but cleared of all other charges in the case, including corruption. It looks likely that he will soon be swapping the comforts of home (and his third wife, model and singer-songwriter Carla Bruni-Sarkozy) for a prison cell.
“The story is so crazy and complicated that it was hard to believe,” a French journalist who has followed the case told The Independent.
“It’s a very serious case, there has been nothing else like this.”
Gaddafi had for years been an international pariah for sponsoring terrorist attacks, including the downing of a French DC-10 in Niger in 1989 with the loss of 170 lives, 40 of them French.
But after the Twin Towers attacks the Libyan strongman made a sustained bid for international respectability.
And it came to pass. In 2007, two months into Sarkozy’s presidency, Gaddafi pitched his tent in the garden of the Elysée palace, snarling the Paris traffic with his 100 limousines and enraging many French citizens.
To the many French voters appalled by the invitation, Sarkozy explained the invitation as payback for Gaddafi’s agreement to free a group of Bulgarian nurses jailed in in Libya on trumped-up charges.
The Parisian court was told, on the contrary, that the truth was almost unbelievably squalid – and reckless.
How was a politician of matchless ambition to gain an edge on his rivals when election campaign donations were rigidly controlled? Sarkozy’s answer, prosecutors claimed, was to obtain massive funding from a source that no-one would suspect.
“Behind the public image, investigations reveal a man driven by overwhelming personal ambition, ready to sacrifice integrity, honesty and rectitude on the altar of power,” prosecutors said.
Son of an aristocratic Hungarian refugee and a mother of mixed Catholic and Sephardic Jewish background, Sarkozy had none of the classic education of the French political elite.
He was educated modestly and qualified as a barrister. But from his teens he was driven by fierce political ambition, unhindered either by his outsider background or the short stature which led to him being written off as “little Sarkozy”.
A charismatic showman, Sarkozy was the first French politician to master television. An early step on the ladder was to become mayor of the prosperous Parisian suburb of Neuilly, from where he gained the patronage of then-prime minister Jacques Chirac.
He showed his ruthless instincts when he turned on Chirac, backing a rival for the presidency in 2002; when that gambit failed he returned to Neuilly – and stunned the nation by becoming the hero of a hostage drama in 1993, in which 21 Neuilly infants were taken hostage in their kindergarten.
Brushing the professional negotiators aside, he strode into the school, negotiated directly with the terrorist, and brought unharmed children out in his arms one by one. He never looked back.
Winning the presidency in 2002, Chirac appointed his mistrusted ex-protégé to the high-risk role of interior minister.
As such Sarkozy paid his fateful visit to Gaddafi’s tent in Tripoli, to discuss illegal immigration, but also, prosecutors claimed, to hammer out his deal with Gaddafi.
Also in Neuilly he fell in love with Cecilia Ciganer-Albeniz, the bride at a wedding he conducted as mayor, subsequently cuckolding the bridegroom and marrying her. His second wife, Cecilia Sarkozy became his closest political adviser, but their marriage fell apart in 2007 on the eve of his becoming president.
But almost immediately Sarkozy again grabbed the tabloid headlines, falling in love at a dinner party with Carla Bruni and marrying her shortly afterwards. His three marriages have produced three sons and a daughter.
For his latest trial, prosecutors accumulated a vast weight of circumstantial evidence, including the claim by Franco-Lebanese middleman Ziad Takieddine that he had brought €5m in three suitcases from Tripoli to Paris, the renting by Sarkozy’s then-chief of staff of a very large safe in a Paris bank and the paying of €250,000 in cash bonuses to campaign works. Takieddine died in Beirut two days before this week’s verdict was due.
The court on Thursday found Sarkozy guilty of criminal conspiracy in a scheme from 2005 to 2007 to finance his campaign with funds from Libya in exchange for diplomatic favours. But he was acquitted of three other charges, including passive corruption, illegal campaign financing and concealment of the embezzlement of public funds.
Sarkozy had fiercely denied wrongdoing, and pointed to the fact that even after years of investigation no smoking gun has been discovered.
“It’s a conspiracy,” he told the court. “Ten years of slander, 48 hours in police custody, 60 hours of interrogations, 10 years of investigations, four months before the court… [but] you will never, ever find one Euro [that I have taken] from Libya, not even a single cent.”
Muddying the waters further are the vagaries of key witnesses. In 2012, middleman Takieddine claimed to have evidence that Libya had poured more than €50m into Sarkozy’s campaign, but then in 2020 retracted the claims – induced to do so, ‘Liberation’ newspaper alleged, by Sarkozy allies including Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, who is on bail on witness-tampering charges.
