It is a crack that could lead to a total collapse. On this Wednesday, May 26, lawyers for Nicolas Sarkozy are delivering their final arguments in the appeal trial over the suspected Libyan financing of his victorious 2007 presidential campaign. The former head of state, now 71, was sentenced in the first instance to five in prison for criminal conspiracy and has already spent twenty days in Paris’s La Santé prison, becoming the first former president incarcerated in the history of the Republic. More than just his freedom, his very legacy hangs in the balance today, before the presiding judge, Olivier Géron, delivers his verdict.
Just as in the first trial, the prosecution has requested a seven-year prison sentence, not only for criminal conspiracy but also for corruption, illegal campaign financing, and receiving misappropriated Libyan public funds. This demand was accompanied by scathing words against the “instigator” of a corruption pact that “degraded the social climate,” a crime of “the highest level of gravity that the Republic can experience.”
The Two Letters That Changed Everything
The damning indictment illustrates the arduous task facing Sarkozy’s defenders, including Christophe Ingrain, who denounced the “grotesque novel” of accusations at the opening of Wednesday’s hearing. The four lawyers are pleading at the end of a trial marked by an unexpected twist: the emergence of unprecedented fractures in the united front that the former president and his right-hand man had presented during the first trial.
The former occupant of the Élysée Palace could previously count on the perfectly aligned defense of his friend Brice Hortefeux and his former collaborator Claude Guéant, a confidant among confidants. This time, he has had to face the defection of the latter, who was absent from the trial for health reasons.
In two letters to the court, dated April 11 and April 26, the man known as “The Cardinal”—the linchpin of the Élysée conquest and subsequent exercise of power—undeniably weakened Nicolas Sarkozy’s defense. He retaliated upon learning that his former boss was questioning his probity. “It is up to Mr. Guéant to explain what he did and why he did it,” the former head of state had just declared from the stand, refusing to explain how he “went shopping,” “gave money to his children,” or “bought an apartment.”
A Brutal Rupture
The break was sudden. While Claude Guéant wrote nothing explicitly incriminating, he conspicuously contradicted Nicolas Sarkozy for the first time. Although he concedes he did not do so immediately, Guéant assures the court that he did indeed inform his boss about his one-on-one meeting in October 2005 with Abdallah Senoussi, the brother-in-law of Muammar Gaddafi and the number two of the Libyan regime. Senoussi was wanted by France for ordering the 1989 bombing of the UTA DC-10. The prosecution is convinced this clandestine meeting served to forge the infamous corruption pact.
Even more damaging, the former Secretary-General of the Élysée recounts an official dinner in Tripoli in the summer of 2007. Nicolas Sarkozy allegedly summoned him so that Gaddafi could repeat “the concern he had just expressed to him regarding Senoussi,” who had been sentenced to life imprisonment in France. Sarkozy then allegedly ordered him with a “Claude, look into this,” a phrase that will remain a signature moment of this trial. Nicolas Sarkozy denies this scene.
Yet, the man who has categorically denied nearly everything put to him during nearly fifteen years of the Libyan affair has been forced to nuance his denials for the first time. He now accepts the idea that his friend, lawyer Thierry Herzog, could have traveled to Libya in late 2005 for a meeting about Senoussi’s penal situation, though he claims he was not the initiator. He also admits he made a mistake when he stated he was never informed of Claude Guéant’s trips to Libya between 2008 and 2010, though he argues these were almost routine missions for a secretary-general.
Accusations of “Cruelty” and “Cynicism”
In a further sign of this turning point’s importance, Claude Guéant’s lawyer returned to the attack on Tuesday, the eve of the decisive pleadings, to further castigate the “cruelty” and “cynicism” of Nicolas Sarkozy’s decision to question his former right-hand man’s probity in order to defend himself. “Claude Guéant’s enforced absence” due to his health “was used” by the former President of the Republic, who wanted to “bet on the fact that those who are absent are always necessarily wrong,” pleaded Philippe Bouchez El Ghozi, stating that his client “is being made a scapegoat.”
“Yes, Claude Guéant met Senoussi, a meeting that was not desired, a meeting that was imposed,” the lawyer stated, adding that he “regrets it and will regret it until the end of the little life he has left to live.” Similarly, “Nicolas Sarkozy asked Claude Guéant to look into the judicial situation of Abdallah Senoussi,” he continued, even if that does not constitute a criminal conspiracy. The burden now falls on the former president’s defense to seal these widening cracks.
