Nicolas Sarkozy’s frame of mind is in part betrayed by the way he handles his thin, silver pen. Taking the stand, facing the presiding judge, he clasped it between his fingers lengthwise. Addressing the civil parties (plaintiffs), he swivels it around, like a magic wand. Or, perhaps, like a large match, for Sarkozy was playing with fire last week during his three days at the stand.
On Tuesday and Wednesday, under questioning by Olivier Géron, the presiding magistrate, the 71-year-old former president described the lifestyle of his long-serving and loyal chief of staff, Claude Guéant, as “strange”, accusing him of having “crossed the line” in his dealings with the late Franco-Lebanese intermediary Ziad Takieddine. The latter acted as a key intermediary for the Sarkozy team in its discussions with the regime of Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, answering directly to Guéant.
Takieddine was summoned to appear as a defendant in the first instance, but had fled France for his native Lebanon. He died on September 23rd last year, two days before the verdict, aged 75.
Sarkozy also targeted his former lawyer and friend, Thierry Herzog, over his supposed collusion with the entourage of the late French president Jacques Chirac, accusing Herzog of having negotiated behind his back, during a 2005 meeting in Tripoli, for the overturning of an international arrest warrant issued against Gaddafi’s brother-in-law and intelligence chief, Abdullah Senussi. The warrant was issued after a Paris court in 1999 handed Senussi in absentia a life sentence for masterminding the 1989 mid-air bombing of a French airliner. All 170 passengers and crew on the Paris-bound UTA airline flight from Brazzaville were killed in the explosion over the Ténéré desert.
Senussi is also suspected of organising the 1988 mid-air bombing of Pan-Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, in Scotland, in which 259 people were killed, and is wanted for questioning by Scottish police.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
The stakes of this appeal trial – effectively a retrial – are crucial, as Sarkozy himself has observed. The prospect of a guilty verdict and a repeat sentence of a prison term could not be more real, nor more palpable. He has his back to the wall, and it appeared last week as if anything goes in his defence to avoid jail time.
Sarkozy was questioned on the main points of the prosecution case as of last Tuesday, and he began by disowning his former loyal collaborators, starting with Guéant. This led up to the question of the alleged efforts by Sarkozy and his entourage to overturn the international arrest warrant issued against Senussi, which Sarkozy firmly denied any personal involvement in. Watched in court by relatives of those killed in the mid-air bombing, the former president again accused his loyal lieutenants of acting without his knowledge.
Guéant, 81, is absent from the retrial on health grounds. In his place, his lawyer, Bouchez El Ghozi, gave a furious reaction to Sarkozy’s attacks. “These accusations brought by Nicolas Sarkozy against his closest collaborator, who has always been faithful, are extremely serious, desperate and pointless,” he told French daily L’Opinion on Wednesday. “Claude Guéant takes very badly these insinuations about his alleged neglect of his duties in order to serve his personal interests, and this questioning of his probity. He considers that these are based on nothing concrete.”
But Ghozi‘s comments did nothing to temper Sarkozy’s attacks on his former collaborators during questioning by the chief prosecutor, Damien Brunet, specialized in organised crime. Brunet questioned the former president about his “apparent ignorance” of Guéant’s “lifestyle”. Sarkozy replied: “Why do you say ‘your apparent ignorance’? Why ‘apparent’? What allowed me to know how Mr Guéant did or did not do his shopping at his country house, or from an apartment in which I had never set foot? Unless you’re picked up in a Ferrari or invited onto his yacht, how can you know what someone’s lifestyle is? I didn’t know about Claude Guéant’s personal life and his lifestyle.”
Sarkozy confirmed that he “had” – he highlighted in the imperfect – “a lot of confidence in Mr Guéant”, but as of 2012 he did not know “how he organised his life”. That was the year when Sarkozy lost his re-election bid, defeated by the socialist François Hollande. Guéant, who as a result lost his post as interior minister, began training to become a lawyer, a surprising career change for a man who had served as a prefect before becoming Sarkozy’s chief of staff and, later, minister. Sarkozy questioned the circumstances of the move. “The prefect who I knew and appreciated does not resemble [himself] in all the episodes that I have seen in the [Libyan funding investigation] case file. Sometimes, I don’t have the impression of dealing with the same person.”
Guéant, the prosecutor pointed out, was a “very efficient collaborator”, both as Sarkozy’s chief of staff when he was interior minister, from 2002-2004 and 2005-2007, and subsequently as chief of staff (secretary general) of the Élysée Palace, “who kept the Élysée machine ticking”, after Sarkozy’s election as president. “I wouldn’t question that,” said Sarkozy.
“What do you think of the presence of intermediaries in the field of action of the interior minister or the president?” asked the prosecutor, referring notably to the roles of Takieddine and middleman Alexandre Djouhri. “In our republic there have always existed unofficial information channels, always,” replied Sarkozy. “One can regret that, but, from my point of view, it will always exist.” The former president said it was “imprudent” on the part of his “collaborators”, Guéant and Brice Hortefeux, to have established relations with Ziad Takieddine.
Hortefeux, 67, a friend of Sarkozy’s since childhood, was a junior minister with responsibility for local authorities under Sarkozy when the latter was interior minister. In an unusual mission for such a junior minister, Hortefeux travelled to Libya to meet Senussi at his Tripoli home on December 21st 2005, three months after Guéant had met Senussi, on October 1st that year. On both occasions Takieddine was present at the talks.
Following Guéant’s meeting with Senussi, interior minister Sarkozy visited Tripoli one week later to meet with Gaddafi, officially to discuss illegal immigration to Europe from Libyan shores.
Hortefeux served in successive ministerial posts after Sarkozy’s election as president in 2007, first as minister for immigration, then as labour minister and finally as interior minister, before he was succeeded by Guéant.
Prosecutor Brunet last week reminded Sarkozy that Takieddine had also accompanied Hortefeux and Guéant on two trips to Saudi Arabia in 2003, when Sarkozy, recently appointed as interior minister for the first time, was involved in an attempt to sell a border control system to his Saudi opposite number, Prince Nayef. This was the so-called ‘Saudi Border Guards Development Program', code named ‘Miksa', with an estimated value of 7 billion euros.
“I didn’t need Ziad Takieddine’s intermediation because I had hosted Prince Nayef, but Takieddine had suggested that it would be good if two people close to me travelled to Saudi Arabia,” retorted Sarkozy. “This idea was that of Mr Takieddine. It was thought to be useful, I validated it.” In December 2003, then-president Jacques Chirac, apparently suspicious of the commercial deal being used as a slush fund, stepped in to halt the negotiations by the interior ministry, blocking plans for a trip by Sarkozy to Saudi Arabia.
When Sarkozy was warned off meeting with Senussi
The scenario was repeated two years later when the dealings with the Gaddafi regime began; Guéant and Hortefeux acting as emissaries, holding secret meetings with the regime’s second in command, Abdullah Senussi, accompanied by intermediary, Ziad Takieddine. However, Guéant and Hortefeux have since claimed that they had “fallen into a trap”.
“At the time I didn’t know that he was seeing Takieddine,” said Sarkozy of Guéant. “I would never have accepted that Mr Takieddine should involve himself in an official visit,” he added, referring to his own meeting on October 6th 2005 with Gaddafi in Libya, seven days after Guéant met with Senussi.
During his flight to Tripoli, Sarkozy was warned against holding any meeting with Senussi by France’s counter espionage chief, Pierre Bousquet de Florian. “How do you explain that this warning was not shared with Claude Guéant and Brice Hortefeux during their trips?” asked the chief prosecutor.
“Brice Hortefeux has spoken of the absence of a note about that,” replied Sarkozy. “But it’s their meeting with Takieddine [in Libya] that I consider to be an imprudence.”
The exchange continued:
-- “Why did you not talk to Claude Guéant about the prudence that was required?”
-- “Claude Guéant went there five days before me. I did not see Senussi. There was no ‘trap’. Why would I talk to him about this warning?”
-- “On the way there, you were yourself warned. And Muammar Gaddafi indeed spoke to you about the legal situation of Mr Senussi.”
Brunet then detailed the statements given by Guéant regarding the efforts to clear Senussi’s legal situation, which continued between 2005 and 2009 when a final meeting on the subject was held at the Élysée Palace, in the presence of Takieddine.
“How could you not have been involved in these discussions about the legal situation of Mr Senussi?” asked the chief prosecutor. Sarkozy insisted that he had “no role” in the events, but, he claimed, there were “parallel discussions” on the subject organised by then president Jacques Chirac, with whom Sarkozy had a tense rivalry, and his team. “It’s got nothing to do with me, nothing,” exclaimed Sarkozy about the arrangements to help Senussi. “It is not possible that I’d be involved with this issue,” denouncing a “channel” of negotiations by Chirac’s camp to overturn the international arrest warrant against Senussi. “It’s a channel linked to my predecessor.”
Sarkozy’s surprising claims of the involvement of Chirac and his aides to help Senussi appeared as an attempt to justify the trip to Libya by his own lawyer and friend, Thierry Herzog, together with lawyer Francis Szpiner to meet with Senussi’s legal advisors. The trip, on November 26th 2005, was made two months after Guéant’s secret meeting with Senussi, and one month before that involving Hortefeux. According to the prosecution, Herzog and Szpinner were in Tripoli to discuss the chances of overturning the international arrest warrant issued against Senussi, and possibly through the ordering of a retrial.
During the judicial investigation into the alleged Libyan funding of Sakozy’s 2007 presidential election campaign, and which led to the trial of Sarkozy and 11 others last year, Herzog refused to answer questions about the trip on the basis of his right to maintain professional confidentiality. Szpinner, meanwhile, simply denied making the journey.
Intriguingly, Szpinner also acted as a lawyer for the French association SOS Attentats which, as an association for victims of terrorist attacks, was a civil party in the case of the bombed UTA airliner.
Sarkozy, denying he was behind the trip by the lawyers while suggesting they were sent by Chirac, declared that Herzog, who he said was Chirac’s “historic” legal representative, became his own lawyer only in 2006.
In the personal archives of Ziad Takieddine, the judicial investigation found a contract issued by Senussi which appointed Herzog as his legal representative. It was not signed by the French lawyer, who Sarkozy said had called him to announce he had “thrown it in the bin”. The former president said “I congratulated him for not wanting to be the lawyer of the killer of 54 French nationals”, who were among the 170 crew and passengers who died in the UTA bombing.
Claire Josserand-Schmidt, lawyer for some of the relatives of the victims of the bombing, and also for anti-corruption NGO Anticor, asked Sarkozy: “Why did he tell you about that? I don’t understand. Mr Senussi has recognised that he hired Mr Herzog and declared that it was you, Mr Sarkozy, who sent him your lawyer.”
“There was no question that the president’s lawyer [could] became Senussi’s lawyer. He [Herzog] did not give in. I congratulated him,” said Sarkozy, who also told the court that he had in 2012 sought – unsuccessfully – Senussi’s extradition from Mauritania, to where he had fled after the downfall of the Gaddafi regime in 2011. That, of course, had little bearing on the substance of the alleged negotiations over Senussi beginning in 2005.
“Why, in 2005, did you not demand the surrender of those people convicted of the [1989] DC-10 bombing?” asked prosecutor Brunet. “The dramatic events had taken place, for Lockerbie like for the UTA DC-10,” replied Sarkozy. “I didn’t have that idea at that moment. If I had done so, it would have been in contradiction with my call for the freeing of the Bulgarian nurses.”
It would have above all have blocked Libya’s attempts to secure the overturning of the warrant issued against Senussi.
The appeal trial resumes on Tuesday.
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- The original two French versions of the court reports on which this article is based can be found here and here.
This abridged English version by Graham Tearse