D-Day for former French President Sarkozy
FRANCE: Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy was due to appear
before an examining magistrate in Bordeaux on Thursday to respond to
charges that his 2007 electoral campaign was financed with funds secured
illegally from France’s richest woman.
In a case that could wreck the 57-year-old’s hopes of a political
comeback, Sarkozy is suspected of taking financial advantage of elderly
L’Oreal heiress Liliane Bettencourt at a time when she was too frail to
fully understand what she was doing.
Examining magistrate Jean-Michel Gentil is expected to spend most of
the day quizzing Sarkozy about how he obtained funding from Bettencourt.
Judicial sources have told AFP that the 57-year-old could be formally
indicted on a charge of taking advantage of someone in a position of
weakness, although the magistrate also has the option of interrogating
him as a witness under caution. Bettencourt is now 90 years old and has
been in poor health since 2006. The allegation against Sarkozy is
two-fold: that the money obtained from her took his campaign financing
over legal limits and that it had been secured without her full
knowledge or consent.
This latter claim was made by Bettencourt’s former accountant, Claire
Thibout in 2010. She told police that she had handed 150,000 euros in
cash to Bettencourt’s right-hand man, Patrice de Maistre, on the
understanding it was to be passed on to Sarkozy’s campaign treasurer,
Eric Woerth.
Maistre, one of the biggest backers of Sarkozy’s UMP party, withdrew
a total of four million euros in cash from Bettencourt’s Swiss bank
account in seven instalments between 2007 and 2009.
Investigators suspect some or all of the money could have found its
way to Sarkozy or his party.
In July, the examining magistrate ordered the seizure of Sarkozy’s
diaries in order to establish what he was doing around the time the cash
was being moved.
French authorities confirmed this week they have also opened a
preliminary investigation over the management of opinion polls carried
out during Sarkozy’s 2007-12 term as President.
That probe was triggered by anti-graft organisation Anticor, which
suspects the former President of having handed the contract for the
polls to a company, Publifact, run by his former advisor Patrick Buisson,
and of using public funds to carry out his own party political electoral
research.
AFP |