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Ex-President in campaign funding fraud

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7 years ago

March 20, 2018

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Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy was being held in police custody on Tuesday for questioning by magistrates looking into allegations of Libyan funding for his 2007 election campaign, an official in the French judiciary said.

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.

A former minister and close ally of Sarkozy, Brice Hortefeux, was also being questioned by police on Tuesday morning 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 funneling money from Gaddafi to finance Sarkozy’s campaign was arrested in Britain and granted bail after he appeared in a London court.

Months after he took office in 2007, the French leader came in for criticism for hosting a state visit by Gaddafi during which the Libyan leader pitched his trademark Bedouin-style tent next to the Elysee Palace.

Gaddafi’s first visit to a Western leader in decades, which was accompanied by the signing of several business deals, came after Sarkozy helped get five Bulgarian nurses accused of infecting children with HIV released from jail in Libya.

Sarkozy was later one of the chief advocates of a NATO-led military campaign that resulted in Gaddafi’s overthrow and killing at the hands of rebel forces in 2011.

French judicial procedure allows for investigators to hold a person for questioning for up to 48 hours, after which the magistrates must say whether they have grounds for turning a preliminary inquiry into a full investigation.

The Libya-funding inquiry appeared to have gone quiet until January, when French businessman Alexandre Djouhri, suspected by investigators of funneling money from Gaddafi to finance Sarkozy’s campaign, was arrested in Britain on a warrant issued by France.

Sarkozy’s predecessor, Jacques Chirac, was convicted in 2011, after his retirement, of misusing public funds to keep political allies in phantom jobs. That made the now ailing Chirac the first French head of state convicted since Nazi collaborator Marshal Philippe Petain in 1945.

Sarkozy has been dogged for years by political scandals, but none has led to a conviction.