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00:00Just last month he'd lost his appeal to avoid an electronic bracelet sentence in a separate case
00:05opening day of Nicolas Sarkozy's Libya campaign financing trial. Three of his former ministers
00:11also accused in Muammar Gaddafi's alleged bankrolling of Sarkozy's winning run for
00:17president back in 2007. Gaddafi would then be welcomed with full honors to Paris. Siobhan Silk
00:24has more. He's already been convicted of influence peddling and on separate charges related to
00:33illegal campaign financing but former French president Nicolas Sarkozy's time before the
00:38courts is not over. After a complex 10-year investigation he's on trial again in perhaps
00:45his most serious case yet. He's accused of accepting 50 million euros in illegal campaign
00:53funds from then Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi for his successful 2007 presidential run.
01:03At this stage in the case we have the proof that a total of six million euros
01:08left Libyan public funds and entered France through the way of middlemen.
01:15These funds were quickly masked.
01:17The claims first came to light in 2011 when a son of Gaddafi demanded that Sarkozy pay back
01:23the alleged funding. It's alleged he accepted the cash in exchange for agreeing to help whitewash
01:29Gaddafi's international reputation. Sarkozy has denied ever receiving any funds from Gaddafi.
01:39He is contesting the accusation which is grotesque. We don't even know the amount of this alleged
01:44financing. Depending on who you ask it's five, six, 50 million, 400 million. We don't even know
01:49the currency. Sarkozy maintains the accusations are part of a revenge conspiracy by Gaddafi
01:57loyalists because of his government's backing for the international military intervention during
02:02the 2011 Libyan civil war which eventually led to the ousting and killing of the dictator.
02:08The proceedings are expected to last several months.
02:11If convicted Nicolas Sarkozy could face up to 10 years in prison.
02:17And for more let's cross to Paris Central Courts France 24's Claire Bacallin.
02:22Is there Claire what's the latest where you are?
02:29Well I've been in the courtroom this afternoon and not too far away from the front of the court.
02:34I've been in the courtroom this afternoon and not too far away from the former French
02:38president Nicolas Sarkozy. He's sitting on some fold down chairs next to three of his
02:44former ministers Brice Hortefeux, Claude Guéant and Eric Werthe. They are all on trial alongside
02:52him. They deny the accusations leveled at them which range from illegal campaign financing to
02:58influence peddling and even corruption. They are accused of being part of a system
03:04whereby money came from the late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi all the way to Paris and all the
03:12way into the offices of the interior ministry where was Nicolas Sarkozy was interior minister
03:17before he became the French president in 2007. Now these three men these former ministers of
03:25his they deny the accusations of course Sarkozy denies them too and we've been hearing from their
03:30lawyers in the courtroom today but also in recent weeks saying there was no secret about the fact
03:36that France and many other western countries European neighbors of France were trying to
03:41re-establish ties with Gaddafi. They were trying to bring Libya in from the cold but that does not
03:49mean and that absolutely does not show that they accepted what could be millions of euros worth of
03:55financing bankrolling Sarkozy's campaign. So strong denials from Sarkozy and his former ministers that
04:02they had anything to do with any kind of financing from Libya to Sarkozy's successful 2007 election
04:10campaign and their lawyers will be arguing hard in the next few months in the courtroom to try and
04:16get their clients off the hook. Yeah investigative reporting has this all starting back in 2005
04:23at the time Nicolas Sarkozy is the interior minister under Jacques Chirac and of course
04:29there's that startling moment where once Sarkozy is elected Muammar Gaddafi welcomed to Paris with
04:36full honors even though the Libyan leader had been one of his right-hand men had been accused
04:43had been convicted in absentia in the downing of a French airliner.
04:51Certainly it was a controversial visit in 2005 just to go back to that point Sarkozy visited
04:58Libya and that is where the argument that this pact of corruption would have been made between
05:04Gaddafi and Sarkozy something that Sarkozy very strongly denies that that pact of corruption
05:09whereby Gaddafi would bankroll Sarkozy's election campaign. Now when it came to 2007 when Sarkozy
05:15won the president election here in France not long after winning that election he traveled
05:20back to Libya and later on that year Gaddafi spent five days on a visit here in France and he famously
05:28pitched his tent in the gardens of the Hotel Marigny so that's a residence that the French
05:33president can use he can allow his VIP guests to stay in that residence so certainly very much an
05:41image associated with this relationship that Sarkozy had managed to form with Gaddafi the
05:47late Libyan leader. Now since then the lawyers for Sarkozy have said well it really was the
05:54diplomatic price to pay because at the time Sarkozy has been trying to get the release secure the
06:00release of Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor who were being held in Libya he did secure
06:07their release and so it was a diplomatic game and it was the price to pay for the release of these
06:12medics at the time but certainly that image of Gaddafi's tent in the gardens of the republic
06:18as they're known was very much an image that has been associated with this intriguing relationship
06:24that Sarkozy had with Gaddafi of course it soured in 2011 and Sarkozy has said that he was the first
06:30western leader to recognize the rebels as the new legitimate leaders in Libya so the rebels who
06:37launched an uprising against Gaddafi and Sarkozy was of course at the forefront as well
06:41of the NATO-led intervention to put in place their no-fly zone over Libya so that relationship
06:47certainly soured in the next in the next few years. Clare Peck and I'm reporting live there
06:51from Paris central courts many thanks. Well for more on this story let's cross to Tripoli.
06:57Anas Alghamadi is director of the SADEC institute think tank. Thank you for being with us here on
07:02France 24. Thank you for having me. Just to pick up on the last point there from Clare Peck and I
07:10were reporting from the courthouse. March of 2011 when Sarkozy basically launches the attack
07:22on Libya catching even the Americans by surprise. Did you at the time have the feeling that
07:29he was shooting at the guy he owed money to? Not at all. I remember sitting with you actually in
07:35that studio in March 2011 watching Sarkozy bomb Gaddafi. I would have never have bet watching
07:4014 years later Gaddafi bomb Sarkozy's legacy. It would have been news to me then. It's still
07:45news to me now. It's still shocking as it is. I think what's most shocking about it is that he
07:50was the first to turn and to turn so with such passion and with such vigor. It was almost as if
07:56there would have been an ulterior motive because France didn't support the Tunisian revolution
08:01in the same way in the beginning. Sarkozy didn't offer assistance to the rebels in Tunisia,
08:05the peaceful rebels and revolutionaries. He offered Ben Ali, the final dictator in Tunisia,
08:10he offered him the support of France's gendarmerie. So this was not someone that was supportive of the
08:14broader regional dynamics. No. How would you, do you see this as different or the same as David
08:22Cameron's support for the rebels? Yeah, I think we can go back even further than David Cameron.
08:31I mean, Blair went to Libya, he went to kiss the ring famously with the deal in the desert and
08:37then it became a full courtship, intelligence sharing, oil contracts that endured up until
08:44up until David Cameron, that went from the Labour administration to the Conservative
08:48administration. And then when the music stopped, the handshake stopped and the bombing began. It
08:52was very, very quick. It was very brief. But I think this is obviously very different because
08:57we have a trail of breadcrumbs that lead right back through multiple middlemen in multiple figures
09:04that are not only invited like Saif al-Islam in the ICC, but also people like Shukri Ghanem,
09:09the former prime minister and the former head of Libya's national oil corporation,
09:13who didn't just have this in his diaries. This is someone that a year later in 2012 was found dead
09:18in the river Danube in Vienna. So this is something that goes much, much broader than
09:23just a couple of individuals that are now standing in court. People have died as a result
09:27or could have died as a result of this. Yeah. French investigators able to find
09:31Shukri Ghanem's notebooks, which are believed to have document payments. How airtight does
09:37the case seem, though? Sarkozy's lawyers say that there is scant circumstantial evidence.
09:45That's their claim. Yeah. I mean, look, we're now living in a world where this is right up
09:51in front of the cameras for the whole world to see. And it's still something that has to go to
09:55trial because there is always plausible deniability when it comes to how these money is made. These
10:00are not idiots. This is also a regime that for 25 years to 30 years that was under embargo,
10:06moved money across the world to enable Libya to do business and sell oil. This was not a poor
10:11country when it was bombed in 2011. It was a country that came out of 30 years of sanctions
10:16for only a couple of years that had 156 billion, I think, in its sovereign wealth fund. Where did
10:21that money come from? And how is it being moved all over the world? You look at today's Panama
10:25papers. This is a regime that made financial crime an art, and an art that I don't think any
10:31regime in the world has today been able to perfect in the way that the Libyan regime had.
10:35But what is so interesting and intriguing about this is that there always are going to be smoking
10:39guns and breadcrumbs because the Libyan regime is the one that kept the receipts. And today,
10:44those receipts, at least here in Libya where I'm sitting, they are public knowledge. And all of
10:49those that are up for ICC, War on Psychocephalic Islam, and his cousin that sits today, or Gaddafi's
10:56cousin, the special envoy in Egypt, Ahmed Gaddafi, have gone on the record and said,
11:00we paid that money. They're happy to indict themselves in this. Abdullah Sanusi is also
11:05in prison, only a few kilometers down the road. He has gone on the record in 2012 saying that he
11:10paid money to get himself off the conviction that he had, I believe, in 1989 for the bombing of the
11:15French aircraft. Yeah, let's talk about this. Just to remind our viewers, Abdullah Sanusi,
11:22brother-in-law of Muammar Gaddafi, head of intelligence services, who was sentenced in
11:28absentia for the downing in 1989 of that French airliner. And it appears as though there was an
11:36attempt in 2009 to get the French to lift the international arrest warrant for Sanusi.
11:45Yeah, well, that 2009 meeting wasn't about justice. It was about its price tag. It's a
11:50convicted criminal that was convicted of terrorism, that was negotiating his freedom
11:55with the individuals and the courts that convicted him, with the government that
11:58essentially convicted him and the victims or the victims' families that were still mourning while
12:03in Paris at the time. I can't understand what they must be thinking about the deals that were made.
12:07And this is also a country that came out of the cold in 2003 after it paid its billions of dollars
12:14in compensation for the Lockerbie bombing, again, in the late 80s, the Pan Am bombing.
12:19So this is a full circle. It's shocking. Honestly, it's shocking to see the level of moral
12:25duplicity that is at play because the Libyans understood, or at least the Gaddafi regime—I
12:30don't want to call the Libyans for that. Libyans are immune from Gaddafi and from his crimes.
12:34But the international community and members of the French administration, the British administration,
12:39the Americans, all of the documents that have been seized over the last 14 years show that
12:43Gaddafi couldn't have done this alone. They weren't just buying favors. They weren't just
12:47buying immunity for individuals like Abdallah Sanusi. They were also buying spying equipment
12:53that was used to spy on people on social media. They were arrested,
12:56they were murdered during the revolution. This is the way that international justice
13:00works. It's not about the search for justice. It's about understanding its price tag and
13:04understanding that what happened in 2005, in 2009, and again in 2011 is not about justice.
13:11It's about the blueprint, because that blueprint continues. Today, we see autocrats across
13:16the Arab world continue to do the same Gaddafi playbook and continue to do it over and over
13:21again. There are regimes that have murdered their way to power, continue to murder their
13:25way in Libya and elsewhere across the world, including individuals like Khalifa Abdo that
13:30sits in eastern Libya and is welcomed. His hand is soaked in blood, but I wonder who else's hands
13:35are soaked in blood after repeatedly shaking the same hands that have committed more murders
13:39since Gaddafi over 42 years, over the last 10 years. It's a shocking story because no one has
13:44learned any of his moral lessons. Only the Libyans that sit here today are wondering why is it
13:49selective justice when Gaddafi's name is mentioned and everyone else keeps dancing
13:53until the music stops. Anas, what's the feeling where you are about the fact that it's going to
13:58trial, that a former French president is sitting in trial? I'm glad that that's the case. I wish
14:04that was the case for Gaddafi when he was murdered in 2011. I wish that he had sat and held to
14:09account for the crimes that he committed against Libyans and against French innocent civilians,
14:14against British American civilians, against German civilians, against Libyans that were
14:18living in diaspora and dissidence for the last 42 years. I wish that this wasn't supposed to
14:23be the symbolic case that I think it is. I think that someone that gets away with wearing an
14:27electric bracelet on his leg, that's not justice in my mind. That's a luxury detainment. I don't
14:33even know if Pablo Escobar got as bad of a trial as Nicolas Sarkozy. So I don't think that we're
14:39going to get the semblance of justice. I think the real justice will be making sure that never
14:44happens again. Anas al-Ghamadi, many thanks for speaking with us from the Libyan capital.