Sunday, May 6, 2012. At precisely eight p.m., Daniel Pujadas, anchorman of the France 2 network, pronounced the nation’s verdict while a simulated image showed a red carpet unfurling toward the entrance to the Élysée Palace: “François Hollande is elected President of the Republic with 51.9 percent of the vote . . .” As Hollande’s portrait flashed on the screen, Judge Jean-Michel Gentil may well have muttered to himself the French equivalent of gotcha!
Nicolas Sarkozy’s loss to his Socialist challenger not only put him out of a job, it also shoved him into the crosshairs of the Bordeaux-based magistrate by lifting his presidential immunity as of June 16. Sarkozy’s suspected implication in the Bettencourt Affair, which had contributed at least tangentially to his loss, was about to become an even bigger problem for him.
In the meantime, the Bettencourt probes were advancing on all fronts. Since an appeals court had cleared the use of Bonnefoy’s illicit recordings in January 2012, Gentil and his colleagues had shifted into high gear. With Banier, d’Orgeval, and de Maistre already designated as official targets, the Bordeaux judges put more than a dozen additional suspects under investigation between February and November. Among them: ex-minister Éric Woerth (abuse of weakness, influence peddling); ex-butler Pascal Bonnefoy and five French journalists (invasion of privacy); and lawyer Pascal Wilhelm and businessman Stéphane Courbit (abuse of weakness). And in a parallel case, Judge Isabelle Prévost-Desprez, suspected of leaking court documents to the press, was herself put under investigation for violation of professional secrets.
As for Sarkozy, Gentil strongly suspected that he had received Bettencourt money. The testimony of Claire Thibout and several Bettencourt employees and ex-employees nourished his presumptions. But no witness reported actually seeing an exchange of cash—at least not on the record. One clue came from an unlikely source: François-Marie Banier. In a notebook seized by police, the photographer had quoted Madame Bettencourt as saying, “De Maistre told me that Sarkozy had asked for money again. I said yes.” Banier had written that note after meeting Liliane on April 26, 2007, the same day that a cash delivery of €400,000 arrived from Switzerland—a coincidence that the judge found “curious, to say the least.”
Interrogated by Gentil, Banier backtracked, suggesting first that this was merely a study for a novel, then asserting that the money in question was within the legal limit, and finally claiming that he wasn’t sure it was Sarkozy that Liliane referred to, “but it was someone important.”
Exasperated, Gentil put the question bluntly: “I’ll ask you one last time, in your recollection did Liliane Bettencourt evoke the name of Nicolas Sarkozy—which seems logical—or another candidate?”
Banier cut him off: “That doesn’t interest me.” While it’s true that Banier had little interest in politics, his flippant answer was probably aimed at protecting Liliane from charges of illegal campaign financing.
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On November 22, 2012, Sarkozy was summoned to Bordeaux for a marathon grilling by Gentil and his two associate judges, Valérie Noël and Cécile Romonatxo. Gentil warned the ex-president at the outset that he was suspected of “fraudulently abusing the state of ignorance or situation of weakness of Madame Liliane Bettencourt.” Under the magistrates’ aggressive questioning, Sarkozy denied having any special relationship with the Bettencourts and insisted that he “never asked them for a centime.” He recalled dining at chez Bettencourt only once, but said he was unable to communicate with his hostess because “she heard nothing.” He admitted making a single brief visit to the Bettencourt home, on February 24, 2007, which he described as a “courtesy” call on André as a respected elder statesman who supported his candidacy.
Concerning his meeting with Liliane Bettencourt and Patrice de Maistre in his Élysée office on November 5, 2008, Sarkozy denied any connection with political funding. “I gave this appointment to the main shareholder in one of France’s leading companies, one of France’s biggest taxpayers, and someone I knew from my days in Neuilly,” he said. It was at that meeting that he had first learned of Françoise’s suit and the potential threat to L’Oréal. Apart from that occasion, Sarkozy denied knowing de Maistre, the suspected conduit for funneling Bettencourt money into his campaign chest. If treasurer Éric Woerth had relations with Liliane’s wealth manager, he never discussed them with Sarkozy.
Asked about his relationship with Prosecutor Courroye, Sarkozy acknowledged their long-standing friendship but insisted that they had never discussed “a single case he was working on.” What about the eight meetings Sarkozy had held with Courroye between 2008 and 2011? Yes, there were meetings, but “neither Philippe Courroye nor I ever acted to slow down, modify, or complicate the Bettencourt affair. . . . There was no interference by the Élysée, no instruction on my part to quash the case.” His only aim in the affair, he said, was “to obtain a mediation, a pacification” in the mother-daughter dispute.
Gentil then asked a key question: “Why would you follow a private judicial affair that at the time concerned only the acts of François-Marie Banier with respect to Liliane Bettencourt?”
“The Banier procedure doesn’t interest us in any case,” Sarkozy snapped. “I don’t know François-Marie Banier.”
The judge attempted to connect the dots. “Couldn’t one imagine that . . . if an investigation [against Banier] proceeded, then all the acts, all the gifts by Madame Liliane Bettencourt would be examined. Isn’t that what could worry the Élysée?”
Even in the written transcript, Sarkozy’s indignation crackles. The target of Françoise Meyers’s suit, he said, was “Banier, and as far as I know, exclusively Banier—the ‘billion.’ Why would the Élysée feel threatened? There was no [illegal] donation for me or my campaign. Why would I be concerned? Why should Nicolas Sarkozy feel threatened by such an investigation?”
At 9:10 p.m., after nearly twelve hours of inconclusive jousting, Gentil brought the interrogation to an end. Though the magistrates refrained from putting the former president under formal investigation, they assigned him the status of “assisted witness,” meaning there were “plausible” reasons to suspect an infraction but not conclusive proofs. Even as Sarkozy’s armored car drove away from the Bordeaux courthouse, his lawyer, Thierry Herzog, was on his cell phone assuring the press that the “affair no longer exists” as far as his client was concerned.
Wishful thinking.
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On March 21, 2013, Sarkozy was summoned back to Bordeaux. This time, he was confronted by four former Bettencourt employees in order to determine whether he had made more than one visit to the Neuilly mansion during the 2007 campaign season. Sarkozy stuck to his earlier claim to have made a single short visit, on February 24, but the testimony of the witnesses convinced the judges that he had made another appearance two weeks earlier. At the end of the seven-hour session, they replaced Sarkozy’s “assisted witness” status with a mise en examen, meaning he was now the target of a criminal investigation. Once a person is put in that category, there are only two possibilities: an indictment followed by a trial, or a non-lieu, which cancels the charges for insufficient evidence. Whichever outcome was reserved for Sarkozy, being named a suspect in a penal case was a major embarrassment. “For a political figure like him,” says Claude Guéant, Sarkozy’s former chief of staff, “the very fact that an investigation is opened is devastating for his image.”
On October 7, 2013, Bordeaux judges Gentil and Valérie Noël issued a long-awaited document: a 267-page ordonnance summarizing the charges and evidence against all the suspects in the abuse of weakness investigation. Ten were indicted and ordered to stand trial, including the main suspects Banier, d’Orgeval, and de Maistre. But charges were dropped for Nicolas Sarkozy. The decision to give him a non-lieu was hardly a declaration of innocence: The magistrates accused Sarkozy of lying about the number of visits to the Bettencourts, which were indeed “intended to obtain an illegal financial support from André and Liliane Bettencourt.” Though they chastised Sarkozy’s “abusive behavior” in seeking funds, they lacked sufficient proof that he or his campaign had actually received any. The decision to drop charges against the former president was all the more baffling since his ex-treasurer and minister, Éric Woerth, accused of receiving Bettencourt money on Sarkozy’s behalf, was himself indicted and ordered to stand trial.
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Sarkozy was doubtless relieved, but it was also a sobering moment. At fifty-eight, he was no longer the wunderkind effortlessly ascending the career ladder. His wavy black hair showed more than a few silver strands. The worry lines on his forehead and the creases around his prominent nose were more deeply engraved. For a time after his 2012 defeat he had abandoned politics and returned to his law practice. He even grew a beard and sported turtlenecks in an attempt to reinvent himself—or at least change his image from political carnivore to laid-back professional. But he was soon dreaming, like Napoleon on Elba, of a return to power. Getting roped into the Bettencourt Affair, even with a non-lieu, was an embarrassing obstacle in his path. And it was not the only one.
Nicolas Sarkozy is one of those politicians who attract scandal because they put their ambitions above the rules. Their relentless quest for power can attract devoted followers but also passionate adversaries. “I once told him that he was radioactive, and that we were all irradiated by him,” says Patrick Ouart, his longtime political ally. “He crystalizes hatreds and resentments to a point that is hard to imagine. He doesn’t realize how much he is detested by the average French establishment.”
As it happened, Sarkozy’s narrow escape from prosecution was only a brief respite in a succession of scandals that would complicate his plans for a political comeback. On July 1, 2014, he suffered the indignity of becoming the first former French president ever taken into police custody for questioning. Summoned to the headquarters of a specialized anticorruption unit in Nanterre, he was interrogated for eighteen hours about his suspected role in a quid-pro-quo scheme aimed at obtaining protected judicial information about several investigations that threatened him. In the wee hours of July 2, the magistrates put him under formal investigation for “active corruption,” “influence peddling,” and “receiving professional secrets.”
This latest scandal grew out of allegations that Sarkozy’s 2007 campaign had received an illicit donation of €50 million from Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi. The judge investigating those charges ordered phone taps on Sarkozy and his lawyer, Thierry Herzog, between September 2013 and March 2014. Though this surveillance turned up nothing about Gaddafi—that investigation is still ongoing—it indicated that the former French president was using a web of informants to follow the progress of certain legal cases that concerned him. Prominent among them: the Bettencourt Affair.
The main informant was Gilbert Azibert, a former Bordeaux prosecutor who then served as attorney general of the Cour de cassation, the country’s highest appeal court. Though Sarkozy and Herzog took the precaution of using discreet cell phones purchased under the ridiculous name of “Paul Bismuth”—bismuth is a chemical element used in suppositories—investigators captured a series of conversations in which Sarkozy offered to get Azibert named to a prestigious judicial post in Monaco in exchange for his information on the Bettencourt case, among others. The post never materialized, but the fact that it was promised in return for Azibert’s services was nonetheless illegal. In March 2016, the Paris appeals court rejected Sarkozy’s challenge to the wiretap evidence, clearing the way for a possible indictment and prosecution. To date, he remains a suspect in that investigation.
There was more to come. On August 30, 2016, the Paris Prosecutor’s Office called for Sarkozy to stand trial for “illegal campaign financing.” One of fourteen defendants in the case—unrelated to the Bettencourt Affair—the former president was accused of participating in a fake billing scheme aimed at concealing the fact that his 2012 campaign spending was more than twice the legal limit of €22.5 million. The timing could hardly have been worse for Sarkozy, coming less than three months before the primary elections that would select his party’s candidate in the May 2017 presidential contest.
At that point, it appeared that Sarkozy’s only hope of avoiding the disgrace of criminal prosecution was to win back the presidency, and five more years of immunity, before the trial could be scheduled. But his chances of doing that were clouded by the scandals that swirled around him. And one of them, the famous Bettencourt Affair, seemed to stick to him like a wad of gum on the sole of his high-heeled Gucci loafers.
In an October 2016 debate among presidential hopefuls, Sarkozy denounced the use of the “sordid Bettencourt Affair” to besmirch his image. The case was hardly the only smudge on him, but the accumulation of judicial issues surrounding Sarkozy undoubtedly contributed to his defeat in the conservative primary, won by his former prime minister, François Fillon, on November 27. Sarkozy’s political career appeared to be over. But the embattled ex-president had some cause for consolation three months later when Fillon himself, who had passed as a model of probity, was embroiled in a nepotism scandal involving more than a million euros in payments to his wife and children for apparently fictitious jobs as parliamentary aides. To those with long memories, the Fillon Affair recalled Mitterrand’s famous injunction against “money that corrupts . . . ruins and rots the conscience of men.”