Ziad Takieddine affair: why is Carla Bruni-Sarkozy summoned by the courts for possible indictment ?

Carla Bruni-Sarkozy est convoquée pour une possible mise en examen. MAXPPP – Alexis Sciard

Carla Bruni-Sarkozy est convoquée pour une possible mise en examen dans l'enquête sur la rétractation en 2020 de l'intermédiaire Ziad Takieddine, qui accusait son époux Nicolas Sarkozy d'avoir financé sa campagne présidentielle de 2007 avec des fonds libyens.

A source close to the matter told AFP on Saturday that the model and singer faces prosecution for concealment of witness tampering, criminal association with a view to preparing trial fraud in an organized gang and with a view to the corruption of Lebanese judicial personnel.

Carla Bruni-Sarkozy could emerge from this interrogation, the date of which has not been specified, indicted or under the more favorable status of assisted witness. The judicial investigation opened in May 2021 looks at the possible attempt by a dozen protagonists in this case to deceive French justice in the Libyan case, the main part of which will be judged in early 2025.

The ex-president was indicted in October, suspected of having approved these maneuvers. In April, his lawyers filed a motion to overturn this measure and, recently, a request to disorient the investigation. His wife has already been interviewed twice by investigators from the Central Office for the Fight against Corruption and Financial and Tax Offenses (OCLCIFF): first as a witness in June 2023, then as a suspect at the beginning May.

An intriguing telephone line

Recently, according to elements of the investigation of which the AFP was aware and partly revealed by Le Parisien, the financial investigating judge in charge of the case believes he has discovered evidence of the use of a hidden telephone line by Carla Bruni-Sarkozy. At the beginning of December 2019, she asked her IT specialist "for a new line completely disconnected from the rest". He subscribes to this subscription in his name the same month.

For the judge, the telephone would have been used in particular by the ex-presidential couple to receive messages from the ex-paparazzi priestess, Mimi Marchand (real name Michèle Marchand), also put in cause, on the progress of the operation.

During her hearing at the beginning of May, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy disputed that it was her phone. One of the messages, however, seems to prove that the former First Lady had been informed in advance of Mimi Marchand's trip to Beirut in mid-October 2020 for the famous interview in which Ziad Takieddine retracts, possibly against remuneration.

Carla Bruni-Sarkozy had previously said she only knew about it when the interview was published, on November 11, 2020. "Why did you lie ?", the OCLCIFF investigator asked him in early May. “Even though I knew she was going (to Lebanon), I didn't know why”, she defends herself.

“Very manipulative”

The judge also found a message sent on this line two weeks before the first wave of arrests in the case, in June 2021. Mimi Marchand announces that a “friend came home last night” and that “everything is fine well". Carla Bruni-Sarkozy assures that she does not "see at all what (Mimi Marchand) can be talking about".

The investigator recalls that this message follows for a few hours the trip to Germany of two protagonists in the case to hand over funds which could have been used to corrupt Lebanese magistrates to free one of Gaddafi's sons from prison. , Hannibal, so that he helps exonerate Nicolas Sarkozy.

"Oh dear", reacts Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, revived. "I don't know. Cash… Hannibal Gaddafi… We are in a sphere where I don't know what to tell you." Still questioned about the elements suggesting the thesis of an occult telephone belonging to her, she replies: "Quite. I understand well. But it's not my number."Before adding: 'I'm trying to put together some explanations' ;#39;".

Asked to conclude, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, says she is "stupidly naive" and adds herself "feeling responsible for the indictment" of her husband.

"It's me who should be", she asserts, presenting herself as & ;quot;only contact" of her husband with Mimi Marchand, who "used the name of (her) husband and (her own) (…) to give herself weight with her friends", as Nicolas Sarkozy asserts. Mimi Marchand, she continues, "is clever, but not necessarily in the truth. She is very manipulative". When asked, the singer's lawyer, Me Paul Mallet, did not respond to AFP.