Mediapart exclusive: "Gaddafi gave Sarkozy 50M euros for election campaign"
Former Libyan PM confirms Gaddafi gave Sarkozy 50M euros for election campaign
"This financing by Mr. Gaddafi and Libya is certified by an official document,” said Mahmoudi, speaking via his lawyer, in response to questions submitted to him by Mediapart.
Mahmoudi himself validated the proposition to finance Sarkozy’s election bid as outlined in a document published by Mediapart on April 28th.
The document, signed by the then head of Libya's foreign intelligence agency, Moussa Koussa, detailed how Gaddafi’s regime had agreed to “support the electoral campaign” of Nicolas Sarkozy for the 2007 presidential elections, and for the “sum of fifty million euros”
Dated December 10th 2006, the document also stated that an agreement on “the amount and method of payment” had been reached at a meeting two months earlier involving Brice Hortefeux, a longstanding friend and close political ally of Sarkozy and who was at the time a junior minister for local government, while Sarkozy was interior minister.
Gaddafi's close aide, Bashir Saleh, then president of the Libyan African Portfolio (LAP), a sovereign wealth investment fund, one of the main investment arms of the regime, was in charge of supervising the payments.
Saleh was named as the addressee of the letter from Moussa Koussa authorising funds for Sarkozy’s 2007 election bid.
The payment to Sarkozy was destined to transit through the LAP, which is suspected of being one of the repositories for hiding funds used by the deposed Gaddafi regime.
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Source : Mediapart
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source (link) Aljazeera
Days before French citizens head back to the booths in a run-off vote to elect their new president, the shadow of scandal has returned to the electoral campaign.
Médiapart, a Paris-based investigative news site, published a 2006 document [Fr/Ar] on Saturday, April 28, that has brought renewed attention to the claim that presidential candidate Nicolas Sarkozy violated campaign financing laws by accepting 50m euros ($66m) from the late Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.
These allegations were followed by another blow just days later, when Mediapart ran an interview [Fr] on Thursday with former Libyan prime minister Baghdadi Ali al-Mahmoudi, in which he confirmed the authenticity of the documents and reiterated the allegations.
The reports first surfaced in March 2011, when Gaddafi, his son, Saif al-Islam, and the former head of Libya's secret services, Abdullah Senoussi, all announced they had proof Tripoli had financed Sarkozy's 2007 presidential campaign.
The campaign finance allegations are the latest episode in a series of scandals in which Sarkozy has been implicated.
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| Sarkozy dogged by corruption accusations |
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Commentators say that cascade of allegations has engendered a 'crisis of confidence' in French democracy.
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