Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy will go on trial for corruption in early 2025, accused of striking a deal with the Gadaffi regime in Libya to obtain illegal financial support for his 2007 presidential election campaign, which he won .
Already involved in several other cases, the former president of France, who denies the charges, will have to appear for four months in front of the court for passive corruption, criminal association, illegal financing of an electoral campaign and concealment of embezzlement of Libyan public funds, reports AFP, quoted by Agerpres.
In the main file, French justice suspects the former president and several of his close associates of having entered into a corrupt pact with Muammar Al-Gaddafi, in order to obtain occult financial support during his winning presidential campaign in 2007.
In the accused’s box, he will be called together with 12 other people, including three of his former ministers: two former ministers of the interior and close to Nicolas Sarkozy – Claude Gueant and Brice Hortefeux, and Eric Woerth, former treasurer of the suspicious presidential campaign . Nicolas Sarkozy has always denied that he committed these acts.
The hearing will take place “between January 6, 2025 and April 10, 2025,” the French authorities said.
After ten years of investigation, the judges responsible for it followed, in broad terms, the requests of the National Financial Prosecutor’s Office (PNF), which believes that Sarkozy was very well aware of the facts attributed to his close associates.
Two businessmen suspected of having acted as middlemen are at the center of the case: Franco-Lebanese Ziad Takieddine, who fled to Lebanon and is therefore expected to be absent from the hearing, and Franco-Algerian Alexandre Djouhri.
Takieddine, the main accuser in this case, stated, before changing his version several times, that he gave, at the end of 2006 and the beginning of 2007, five million euros to Nicolas Sarkozy, then minister of interior of France, and his cabinet director, Claude Gueant.
The judicial investigation was opened in April 2013 based on allegations made by Libyan officials as early as 2011, claims made by Takieddine and a document published by the online investigative newspaper Mediapart between the two rounds of the 2012 presidential election, which Sarkozy he lost them. Sarkozy contested the authenticity of this document.
Editor: Adrian Dumitru
