Nicolas Sarkozy goes on trial accused of receiving illegal funding from Gaddafi
Share:
Former French president alleged to have received millions of euros from Libyan dictator’s regime to fund campaign. The former French president Nicolas Sarkozy will go on trial on Monday over the biggest political financing scandal in modern French history, in which he is alleged to have received millions of euros in illegal election campaign funding from the regime of the late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi.
![[Sarkozy and Gaddafi shaking hands]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/4fede086ea8766168cedfbb2afc181b554243f0f/0_55_2336_1401/master/2336.jpg?width=445&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
The historic trial of the rightwing former French president and 12 other people – including three former government ministers – for criminal conspiracy to receive funds from a foreign dictator on a massive scale threatens to worsen voters’ already low trust in the French political class.
After a 10-year anti-corruption investigation, the court will hear allegations of what investigative magistrates called a “corruption pact” forged between Sarkozy and the Libyan regime in which intermediaries delivered suitcases full of cash to ministry buildings in Paris to illegally fund Sarkozy’s victorious 2007 presidential campaign.
The court will examine whether, in exchange for funding Sarkozy’s presidential campaign, the Libyan regime requested diplomatic, legal and business favours. One of these alleged requests for favours related to Abdullah al-Senussi, Gaddafi’s spy chief and enforcer. Senussi had been sentenced in absentia to life imprisonment by a French court in 1999 for his role in the 1989 bombing of a UTA passenger plane over Niger which killed 170 people. The court will hear how requests were allegedly made by the Libyan regime to Sarkozy’s entourage to find a way to lift France’s international arrest warrant against Senussi.
