UP EXPERT OPINION: ADEKEYE ADEBAJO: The comeuppance of Nicolas Sarkozy

The investigation of Sarkozy began in 2013, two years after Gaddafi’s son, Saif al-Islam, accused Sarkozy of taking millions of dollars from his father to finance his presidential campaign. In 2012, shady Lebanese-French business person Ziad Takieddine claimed that he had handed €5m in cash to Sarkozy and had proof of €50m in campaign funds having been paid by Tripoli to Sarkozy’s campaign. The mercurial Takieddine later recanted (a case is still pending against Sarkozy and his wife for pressuring a witness) before reinstating his accusation shortly before his death from a heart attack in Beirut two days before the Sarkozy verdict. Other shadowy figures in this sordid drama involved Libyan spies, convicted terrorists and assorted arms dealers.

Though French prosecutors accused Sarkozy of a “Faustian corruption pact”, they missed a crucial point in assuming that the corrupter was Faust rather than the devil. Sarkozy was accused of seeking funds from Gaddafi in exchange for rehabilitating the Libyan dictator’s image in the West and winning lucrative economic deals once Sarkozy became president. Two of the French president’s former ministerial aides were also found guilty. To make matters worse, Sarkozy’s supermodel-singer wife, Carla Bruni, was charged last year with concealing evidence linked to the Gaddafi case.

"A sleaze-ridden French political elite has often assumed it was above the law."

Sarkozy would repay Gaddafi four years after scrounging funds from him by instigating the Nato intervention — alongside Britain’s David Cameron and America’s Barack Obama — resulting in the assassination of the Libyan leader, proving in this case that there is no honour among thieves.

Sarkozy has had a history of scandal, having twice been convicted in 2021. He became the first post-war French president to be sentenced to jail when he bagged one year of house arrest after being found guilty of bribery and influence-spending. He had been accused of seeking to obtain information from a senior magistrate, Gilbert Azibert, in 2014, in a case against him of illegal campaign payments. Sarkozy was subsequently convicted for exceeding campaign spending limits in his unsuccessful 2012 presidential re-election campaign and ordered to spend a year in jail (with six months suspended). In June, he was stripped of his Légion d’honneur: France’s highest national award.