Claude Guéant was irritated by Nicolas Sarkozy’s attacks. The former French president repeatedly emphasized, during his cross-examination last week at the appeal trial over suspicions of Libyan funding for his 2007 campaign, the gap between the friend he once knew and what he discovered in the case file. Sarkozy even suggested, barely veiling his words, that his “closest aide” had drawn extensively from Libyan funds. Guéant, Sarkozy’s former chief of staff at the Elysée Palace, was too unwell to attend the hearings. But he responded with a rather terse three-page letter, structured in nine points and dated April 11, in a turning point in the proceedings.
Despite some inconsistencies, the key defendants had at least presented a united front until then. Sarkozy claimed to know nothing about the troubling 2005 visits of Guéant, then his chief of staff at the Interior Ministry, and Brice Hortefeux, his best friend, to Tripoli, where they met Libyan terrorist sponsor Abdullah al-Senoussi, who had been sentenced in absentia to life imprisonment in France in 1999 for the bombing of a flight that killed 170 people a decade earlier. The prosecution has made the case that the resolution of the legal fate of Senoussi, the brother-in-law of Muammar Gaddafi, was one of the conditions for the funding of Sarkozy’s presidential campaign.
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