After having long been considered a key witness in the Libyan financing of Nicolas Sarkozy’s campaign in 2007, Ziad Takieddine did an about-face on Wednesday.
It’s a turnaround that nobody really expected, but one that fits the character perfectly. Since 2012, the sulfurous intermediary Ziad Takieddine has multiplied the accusations in sometimes vague and often contradictory statements on supposed Libyan financing of the presidential campaign of Nicolas Sarkozy in 2007. On Wednesday, he assured it loud and clear: “there was no funding for Sarkozy’s presidential campaign”. For a long time, however, he had assured the contrary.
2012: From Sarkozy’s defense to the prosecution
Before accusing Nicolas Sarkozy in the Libyan case, the Franco-Lebanese businessman first defended himself in the Karachi case: in a book published in March 2012, he claims that the judges who are investigating the financing of the Balladur campaign in 1995 “instrumentalize the affair and the press against the Elysee Palace in the run-up to the presidential election”. But Nicolas Sarkozy, ex-Balladurien, is not worried. At the same time, Mediapart published a first note affirming that the intermediary was “in charge of the assembly” of hidden financing of the 2007 campaign. Ziad Takieddine refutes at France24: “There is nothing that can go into this meaning”.
But a month later, Mediapart published another document, attributed to a former Libyan dignitary, asserting that the regime of Muammar Gaddafi had agreed during a meeting on October 6, 2006, to finance this campaign to the tune of “50 million” euros “. The first about-face of the intermediary. “I am a happy man, This document proves that we are in the presence of a very big affair, that these 50 million have been paid, in whole or in part”, he assures in a press release.
On May 9, he judged the Mediapart information “completely credible” before judge Renaud Van Ruymbeke, in charge of the Karachi case. Regarding his arrest two months earlier on his return from Libya with 1.5 million euros in a suitcase, he said he was convinced that he had been arrested because “Mr. Guéant was convinced that I had proof of this. funding”.
2013: “I have proof”
In January 2013, the revelation of the last hearing, dating from the end of 2012, of Ziad Takieddine, had the effect of a thunderclap: he said he was ready to “provide the existing elements on the financing” of the 2007 campaign, which “would exceed 50 million euros”. On April 11, the police raided his Parisian home, where he summoned the press the next day. “Did Gaddafi pay Sarkozy? Yes, yes, he paid for the campaign, paid for something else,” said Ziad Takieddine.
“I told ‘the judge’ that the documents exist.” Before assuring: “I will never say where they are because I do not trust the justice.” In the process, a judicial investigation is opened on April 19 to examine these accusations.
2016: “5 million euros” in cash
Three years later, while Nicolas Sarkozy is seeking the nomination of the “Republicans” for the presidential election of 2017, Ziad Takieddine speaks in Mediapart on November 15. Between November 2006 and early 2007, “I transported a total of 5 million euros” in suitcases during three trips, says the businessman. These suitcases were for the first two deposited directly in the office of Claude Guéant, then director of the cabinet of Nicolas Sarkozy at the Ministry of the Interior, he said.
For the third trip, he claims to have made the handover, still Place Beauvau, but “directly above”, in an apartment where Nicolas Sarkozy was. He will be convicted of defamation in 2020. Heard by anti-corruption investigators, he confirms the information and his willingness to act in “the interest of France” to denounce “very deep corruption”. He was indicted in December for “complicity in the bribery of a foreign public official” and for “complicity in the embezzlement of public funds in Libya”.
2020: withdrawal
On the run in Lebanon, to escape his sentence to prison in the Karachi case, Ziad Takieddine withdraws his charges in an interview with Paris Match and BFMTV broadcast on November 11 and implicates Judge Tournaire, previously in charge of the ‘Libyan’ investigation.
“I say it loud and clear, this Tournaire judge was kind enough to turn it around in his own way and make me say things that are totally contrary to the words I said: there was no financing of Sarkozy’s presidential campaign “.
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The day after Ziad Takieddine’s about-face, the national financial prosecutor recalls that the indictments in the investigation into suspicions of Libyan financing of Nicolas Sarkozy’s campaign in 2007 are not based only on the statements of the intermediary Ziad Takieddine. “The indictments, in this case, are based, in accordance with the provisions of the Code of Criminal Procedure, on serious or concordant clues”, writes prosecutor Jean-François Bohnert in a press release.
