Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy, convicted twice in separate cases since leaving office, goes on trial Monday charged with accepting illegal campaign financing in an alleged pact with the late Libyan dictator Moamer Kadhafi.
Sarkozy's career has been shadowed by legal troubles since he lost the 2012 presidential election but he is an influential figure and also known to regularly meet President Emmanuel Macron.
The fiercely ambitious and energetic 69-year-old, who while in power from 2007-2012 liked to be known as the "hyper-president", has been convicted in two cases, charged in another and is being investigated in connection with two more.
The new trial is starting barely half a month after France's top appeals court on December 18 rejected his appeal against a one-year prison sentence for influence peddling, which he is to serve by wearing an electronic tag rather than in jail.
Sarkozy will be present in the Paris court when the trial gets underway from 1230 GMT and plans to attend the initial phase of hearings, a source close to him told AFP, asking not to be named.
Twelve suspects are standing trial, including former close aides, accused of devising a pact with Kadhafi to illegally fund Sarkozy's victorious 2007 election bid. They deny the charges.
If convicted, Sarkozy faces up to 10 years in prison under the charges of concealing embezzlement of public funds and illegal campaign financing.
The trial is due to last until April 10.
Sarkozy "is awaiting these four months of hearings with determination. He will fight the artificial construction dreamed up by the prosecution. There was no Libyan financing," said his lawyer Christophe Ingrain.
Sarkozy is still not wearing the electronic tag -- a process which could take several weeks -- and spent the Christmas holidays in the Seychelles with his wife, model and singer Carla Bruni, and their daughter.
In the current case against Sarkozy, the result of a decade of investigations, it is alleged that he and senior figures pledged to help Kadhafi rehabilitate his international image in return for campaign financing.
Tripoli had been blamed by the West for bombing attacks on Pan Am Flight 103 in 1988 over Lockerbie in Scotland and UTA Flight 772 over Niger in 1989 that killed hundreds of passengers.
Another alleged beneficiary was Kadhafi's brother-in-law and intelligence chief Abdullah Senussi who was jailed for life in absentia by France for the attack on UTA Flight 772 and has long been wanted for questioning over the Lockerbie bombing.
Sarkozy has denounced the accusations as part of a conspiracy, insisting he never received any financing from Kadhafi and that there is no evidence of any such transfer.Others on trial include Sarkozy's former right-hand man, Claude Gueant, his then-head of campaign financing, Eric Woerth, and former minister Brice Hortefeux.
The case of the prosecution is based on statements from seven former Libyan dignitaries, trips to Libya by Gueant and Hortefeux, transfers as well as the notebooks of the former Libyan oil minister Shukri Ghanem, found drowned in the Danube in 2012.
At a time when many Western countries were courting the maverick dictator for energy deals, Kadhafi in December 2007 visited Paris, famously installing his tent in the centre of the city.
But France then backed the UN-sanctioned military action that helped in 2011 oust the Libyan leader, who was then killed by rebels.
Sarkozy has said allegations from former members of Kadhafi's inner circle over the alleged campaign financing are motivated by revenge.
The scandal erupted in April 2012, while Sarkozy was in the throes of his re-election campaign, when the Mediapart website published a bombshell article based on a document purportedly from December 2006 it said showed a former Libyan official evoking an agreement over the campaign financing.
Sarkozy has long contended that the document is not genuine.
An embittered Sarkozy would later narrowly lose the second round of the election to Socialist Francois Hollande.Franco-Lebanese businessman Ziad Takieddine, a key figure in the case and a fugitive in Lebanon, had claimed several times that he helped deliver up to five million euros in cash from Kadhafi in 2006 and 2007.
But in 2020, Takieddine retracted his statement, raising suspicions that Sarkozy and close allies may have paid the witness to change his mind.
In a further twist, Sarkozy was charged in October 2023 with illegal witness tampering while Carla Bruni was last year charged with hiding evidence in the same case.
© Agence France-Presse
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