Libyan Dictator Gaddafi Funded Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s Election Campaigns?

Nicolas Sarkozy, the Former President of France is detained recently for his alleged links with the late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, from whom Sarkozy has received millions of dollars as his election campaign funds in 2007, which ensured his victory as the President of France.

The investigation involving the former President of the country is France’s most explosive political financing scandal in decades. Though the right-wing politician who led France between 2007 and 2012 has repeatedly denied the allegations, dismissing the claims as distorted.

The investigation started one year after Nicolas Sarkozy left the President’s office after being defeated by Socialist rival Francois Hollande in the Presidential election of 2012. In the year 2013, an inquiry into alleged illegal campaign funding from Libya was opened. The case that was initiated by the government, did not name anyone as a suspect and the investigation is focused on claims of corruption, trafficking influence, forgery, abuse of public funds and money laundering.

So far, the investigations have revealed that Libya during Gaddafi’s regime secretly gave Sarkozy 50 million Euro for the 2007 election campaign. It is illegal, as such a sum would be more than double the legal campaign funding limit in France and the limit was 21 million Euros at the time. The alleged financial transaction also violated the French rules, dealing with foreign financing and declaring the source of campaign funds.

After repeatedly refusing to answer the investigating magistrate's summons to turn up for questioning, finally for the first time the former President Sarkozy has been officially detained and questioned over the scandal. It is possibly the most seditious of the allegations leveled against a former President and members of his team. 63-year-old Nicolas Sarkozy, who was being held at the police station in Nanterre, west of Paris, has again described the accusations as “grotesque” and a “crude manipulation”.

In 2012, Media organisation Mediapart published a document signed by Moussa Koussa when he was head of Libya's external intelligence services, which indicates that, Gaddafi had agreed to send 50 million euros ($61.4 million) to help Sarkozy's election campaign in 2006.

In 2016, Ziad Takieddine a Lebanese-French businessman who is known as close to Gaddafi's government also told Mediapart that he had personally traveled from the Libyan capital, Tripoli to Paris on three times to deliver suitcases containing a total of $6.2 million in cash to fund Sarkozy's campaign in 2006 and 2007.

Takieddine, who is also under investigation in France for a number of alleged offenses, including receiving illegal brokerage on French arms deals to Pakistan and Saudi Arabia in 1993-95, has also told investigators that Libya had agreed to fund the campaign to the tune of 50 million euros.

It is also very interesting to note that Nicolas Sarkozy had a complex relationship with Muammar Gaddafi. After becoming the French president, Sarkozy invited the Libyan leader to France for a state visit and welcomed him feted with honors, most importantly allowing the Libyan leader to stay in a Bedouin tent pitched near to the Elysee Palace. But the relationship between the two leaders soon started deteriorating.

Three years after he won the election with the alleged support of the Libyan dictator, the two leaders had fallen apart after the French president advocated NATO-led air strikes in support of the rebellion in Libya that would ultimately end Gaddafi’s 42-year rule, killing of the dictator in 2011.

After the Libyan dictator was killed, his son Saif Islam Gaddafi has demanded time and again from Sarkozy, that he should give back the money. He said, “We have financed his election campaign and we also have the proof”, he also said, “The first thing we are demanding is that this clown gives back the money to the Libyan people.”

Sarkozy has dismissed all the allegations against him by Libya and his opponents. But the proofs that resurfaced after his tenure as the President of France, says a different truth, he used and thrown the Libyan autocrat, who was killed in still-hazy circumstances in his hometown of Sirte in October 2011.