A Paris court will rule this week whether former French president Nicolas Sarkozy accepted illegal campaign financing from late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, after his key accuser died on Tuesday in Beirut.
Thursday's verdict represents another critical juncture for Sarkozy, who denies the charges. The 70-year-old, who was president from 2007 to 2012, has already been convicted in two separate cases and stripped of France's highest honor.
Prosecutors argued that the former conservative leader and his aides devised a pact with Gaddafi in 2005 to illegally fund Sarkozy's victorious presidential election bid two years later.
They have demanded a seven-year jail term, although even if convicted, Sarkozy is likely to appeal, and it is doubtful he would be sent to prison immediately.
In a dramatic coincidence, Franco-Lebanese businessman Ziad Takieddine, a key accuser of Sarkozy in the case, died in Beirut Tuesday aged 75, his French lawyer Elise Arfi told AFP.
Takieddine had claimed several times that he helped deliver up to five million euros ($6 million) in cash from Kadhafi to Sarkozy and the former president's chief of staff in 2006 and 2007.
A family source, asking not to be named, told AFP in Lebanon that Takieddine had been in prison in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli in a case related to a financial dispute with a lawyer and died in hospital after a cardiac arrest.
Takieddine took refuge in 2020 in Lebanon, which does not extradite its citizens.
Sarkozy meanwhile is expected to be present for the verdict. He has said there was not "a single Libyan cent in my campaign".
'Fight to the End'
Prosecutors allege Sarkozy and senior figures entered a "corruption pact" to help Kadhafi rehabilitate his international image in return for campaign financing.
Tripoli had been blamed by the West for bombing Pan Am Flight 103 in 1988 over Lockerbie, Scotland and UTA Flight 772 over Niger in 1989, killing hundreds of passengers.
Eleven others were charged alongside Sarkozy, including his former right-hand man, Claude Gueant; his then-head of campaign financing, Eric Woerth; and former minister Brice Hortefeux, all of whom deny the charges.
The prosecution's case is based on statements from seven former Libyan dignitaries, trips to Libya by Gueant and Hortefeux, financial transfers, and the notebooks of the former Libyan oil minister Shukri Ghanem, who was found drowned in the Danube river in 2012.
"It will take as long as it takes, but I will fight to the end to prove my innocence," Sarkozy told newspaper Le Figaro.
Top Honor Stripped
Sarkozy has faced a litany of legal problems since his mandate and has been charged separately with corruption, bribery, influence-peddling and campaign finance infringements.
He was first convicted for graft and sentenced to a one-year jail term, which he served with an electronic tag for three months before being granted conditional release.
The only other French leader to be convicted in a criminal trial is Jacques Chirac, who received a two-year suspended sentence in 2011 for corruption over a fake-jobs scandal.
But Sarkozy is France's first post-war president to be sentenced to serve time, a conviction he is appealing at the European Court of Human Rights.
Separately, he received a one-year jail term in the so-called "Bygmalion affair" for illegal campaign financing.
An appeals court in 2024 confirmed the conviction but lightened his sentence to six months with another six months suspended.
He has appealed that ruling, with a hearing scheduled on October 8.
Sarkozy has faced repercussions beyond the courtroom, including losing his Legion of Honor, France's highest distinction, following the graft conviction.
In 2020, Takieddine suddenly retracted his incriminating statement in the Libya case, prompting accusations that Sarkozy and close allies paid the witness off, something they have always denied. Shortly afterwards, he contradicted his own retraction.
Both Sarkozy and his wife, the singer and model Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, have been charged on suspicion of putting pressure on a witness over those allegations in what is now a new legal case.
Legal woes aside, the man who styled himself as the "hyper-president" while in office still enjoys considerable influence and popularity on the right of French politics, and is known to regularly meet with President Emmanuel Macron.
AFP
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