Sarkozy in the dock: As the former French president faces corruption charges over ‘suitcases of cash from Gaddafi’, why the sensational claims are set to reignite interest from around the world

When French President Nicolas Sarkozy and his supermodel wife of two months, Carla Bruni, arrived in Britain for a state visit in March 2008, they were celebrated as Gallic royalty.

The newlyweds stayed at Windsor Castle and had a private lunch with the Queen and Prince Philip before Sarkozy traveled to Westminster to address both houses of Parliament.

That evening, at a grand banquet in St George’s Hall, he toasted ‘the brotherhood of the French and British people’, while Her Majesty did her bit for the entente cordiale by conferring on him an honorary knighthood.

Such a wonderful occasion will today seem like a very distant memory to the man commonly known as ‘Sarko’.

This morning, the 69-year-old will take his place in the dock at Paris’ main criminal court, with an electronic tag on his right leg.

Sarkozy, who was convicted in December of attempting to bribe a judge, now faces his most serious charges yet: corruption, illegal campaign financing, benefiting from embezzled public funds and participation in a criminal conspiracy.

In a trial set to last as long as three months, prosecutors will allege he accepted laundered money worth tens of millions of pounds in total from Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, the late dictator of oil-rich Libya.

The money reportedly helped finance the 2007 election campaign that brought Sarkozy to power, meaning his victory will forever be tarnished by claims that it was based on dirty money from North Africa.

If found guilty, the man nicknamed “President Bling-Bling” because of his taste for the good life could face up to 10 years in prison.

And his wife could suffer a similar fate. Carla, 57, is accused of being part of a £4 million campaign called ‘Operation Save Sarko’, a complex and illegal scheme to keep her husband out of jail.

She has been charged with a range of corruption offences, including ‘witness tampering in an organized gang’, and her trial is expected to start later this year.

This is all a far cry from the days when Sarko was heralded as the poster child for French conservatism and I regularly interviewed him as a journalist and author in Paris.

He projected himself to me as a Margaret Thatcher-style reformer who would liberalize the French economy, just as the Iron Lady did in Britain in the 1980s.

The pace at which he worked to bring about change earned him the nickname ‘Speedy Sarko’ – and he did not slow down in his personal life either.

He became the first French president to divorce his wife while in office. A break with Cécilia was always on the cards, as they were both known for their illicit affairs.

Indeed, Nicolas and Cécilia were both married to other people when they first got together. He was with his first wife, Marie-Dominique, and Cécilia’s husband was a French TV presenter named Jacques Martin, a sort of French Bruce Forsyth who was 24 years her senior.

Sarkozy met them on their wedding day because he led the ceremony as mayor of the Parisian suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine. Although he was 29 and married, Sarko later admitted that after seeing the beautiful bride for the first time, he wondered, “Why am I marrying this woman to someone else?” She’s for me.’

The two couples often went on skiing holidays together, and Sarko was confused when Marie-Dominique saw footprints in the snow under Cécilia’s window.

Cécilia was briefly the First Lady of France when Sarkozy entered the Élysée Palace in 2007, but her days were numbered from the start as she was known to have a French-Moroccan businessman, while her husband’s conquests at the time included a political journalist in the center was included. -Right daily Le Figaro.

As a result, Sarkozy’s five-year term took on the status of a wild soap opera, reaching its peak when he wooed Bruni, an Italian heiress and self-proclaimed “tamer of men” whose former lovers included multi-millionaires like Mick. Jagger and – so the rumors went – ​​Donald Trump.

Sarko himself enjoyed the good life and thought nothing of borrowing superyachts and private jets from billionaire industrialists while treating them to lavish meals at Michelin-starred restaurants.

After becoming Sarko’s third wife, Carla quickly turned into his Marie Antoinette, presidential accounts revealed she spent £660 a day on fresh flowers for the Élysée Palace.

With so much energy being invested in the high life, many suggested that hoovering up the super-rich had become Sarkozy’s priority – an accusation that gained further credence when the highly controversial Gaddafi rolled into Paris in December 2007.

Sarko had invited the so-called ‘Brother Leader’ for a state visit on the red carpet and the Libyan despot was even given permission to set up his tribal tent in the ornate presidential gardens near the Champs-Élysées.

This kind of bromance was all the more inappropriate given that Gaddafi was linked to a series of atrocities, including the Lockerbie bombing, which killed 270 people when a Pan Am flight bound for New York crashed over Scotland in 1988, and the shooting down of Metro police officer Yvonne Fletcher by a gunman in the Libyan embassy in London four years earlier.

Even Sarko’s own secretary of state for human rights, Rama Yade, said France was “not a doormat” for Gaddafi to “wipe the blood of his crimes.” But Sarkozy merely shrugged, knowing that his presidential immunity would protect him from investigation.

This all changed in May 2012, when he lost his first bid for re-election to François Hollande. Within a day, Sarkozy’s Parisian mansion was raided by the fraud squad – and trouble for him and his wife started to get serious.

Because Gaddafi was not the former president’s only problem. Sarkozy was first suspected of involvement in corrupt dealings when he was accused of accepting envelopes full of cash from the late L’Oreal heiress Liliane Bettencourt.

Although these claims did not hold water – his lieutenants took the blame – Sarkozy was sentenced to three years for trying to obtain secret information from a judge about the case against him.

Wiretaps proved the prosecution case against Sarkozy, who was told he could serve a year with an electronic tag, while the other two were suspended.

He is currently appealing another prison sentence – this time of a year – for using false accounting to conceal illegal overspending in his failed 2012 re-election campaign.

Other ongoing cases include claims he was involved in Qatargate – the successful but allegedly corrupt scheme to host the 2022 World Cup in Qatar.

But it is the Libya affair that will now revive interest in Sarkozy around the world. It is based mainly on allegations made by a French-Lebanese businessman named Ziad Takieddine, who once told French media that he had personally handed over suitcases full of banknotes to Sarkozy and his chief of staff, Claude Guéant, in 2006-2007 (something the latter later said) . rejected).

Takieddine said the equivalent of at least £42 million was illegally poured into Sarkozy’s 2007 presidential campaign.

A document signed by the former head of Libyan intelligence, Moussa Koussa, apparently proves the payment. Unfortunately for Sarkozy, Koussa, like many witnesses from that time, is still very much alive.

That includes Gaddafi’s son Saif al-Islam, who told me he was one of “numerous Libyans willing to provide conclusive evidence” that huge amounts of cash were given to middlemen working for Sarkozy.

There is no love lost between the two men, as it was Sarkozy who ordered the French air force, backed by NATO allies, to bomb targets in Libya in March 2011 as a means of protecting civilian lives during the Arab Spring uprising. But regime change was clearly the desired outcome.

By the time Sarkozy and Britain’s then Prime Minister David Cameron made a triumphant joint visit to Tripoli in September that year, the fleeing Gaddafi was about to be beaten to death by a mob.

A key question for judges to consider is whether Sarko wanted Gaddafi dead because of his potential to produce incriminating evidence. There are claims, albeit hotly disputed, that Gaddafi was killed by agents working directly for the Sarkozy government.

Sarkozy and Bruni deny all accusations and are determined to prove their innocence. Yet moves are already underway to strip him of his Legion d’Honneur and Order of Merit – France’s highest civilian honors.

As the first French president convicted of crimes committed while in office, he has “almost no chance of retaining them,” a senior judicial source in Paris told me.

All in all, no one can blame Carla for ruining the day she met a charismatic politician with a penchant for la grande vie.

• Nabila Ramdani is a French-Algerian journalist and academic and author of Fixing France: How To Repair A Broken Republic.