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PARIS. — Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy was being held in police custody yesterday for questioning by magistrates looking into allegations of Libyan funding for his 2007 election campaign, an official in the French judiciary said. It is the first time Sarkozy has been questioned in the inquiry.
A lawyer for Sarkozy could not be reached immediately for comment.
France opened a judicial inquiry in 2013 into allegations that Sarkozy’s successful 2007 election bid benefited from illicit funds from late Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.
Libyan officials from the Gaddafi era have claimed they helped finance Sarkozy’s election campaign.
Investigators are examining claims that Gaddafi’s regime secretly gave Sarkozy 50 million euros overall for the 2007 campaign. Such a sum would be more than double the legal campaign funding limit at the time of 21 million euros.
In a video interview with the investigative website Mediapart in November 2016, French-Lebanese businessman Ziad Takieddine said he delivered three suitcases from Libya, containing five million euros in cash, to Sarkozy and his former chief of staff and campaign director, Claude Guéant.
Takieddine said he had given a written deposition to judges detailing three cash handovers between 2006 and 2007 and his meetings with Guéant and Sarkozy.
At no point, he said, did he see the two men look inside the cases after he dropped them off at the Interior Ministry, where Sarkozy was minister at the time.
A former minister and close ally of Sarkozy, Brice Hortefeux, was also being questioned by police yesterday in relation to the Libya investigation, another source close to the probe said.
Sarkozy, who served as president from 2007 to 2012, has always denied receiving any illicit campaign funding and has dismissed the Libyan allegations as “grotesque”.
In January a French businessman suspected by investigators of funnelling money from Gaddafi to finance Sarkozy’s campaign was arrested in Britain and granted bail after he appeared in a London court.
Sarkozy has already been ordered to stand trial in a separate matter concerning financing of his failed re-election campaign in 2012, when he was defeated by Francois Hollande.
Sarkozy had a complex relationship with Gaddafi.
Soon after his election to the presidency, Sarkozy invited the Libyan leader to France for a state visit and welcomed him with high honours. But Sarkozy then put France in the forefront of NATO-led airstrikes against Gaddafi’s troops that helped rebel fighters topple his regime in 2011. — France24/AFP/AP/Reuters/Herald.
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