terça-feira, 13 de março de 2012

Muammar Gaddafi financiou a eleição de Nicolas Sarkozy em 2007?

Exclusive: secret report describes Gaddafi funding of Sarkozy's 2007 election campaign

 | PAR FABRICE ARFI ET KARL LASKE
According to information contained in a confidential report prepared by a recognised French expert on terrorism and terrorist financing, President Nicolas Sarkozy’s 2007 election campaign received up to 50 million euros in secret funds from the regime of the late Libyan dictator Colonel Muammar Gaddafi.
Mediapart has obtained exclusive access to the document, written by Jean-Charles Brisard, who has notably served since 2002 as an investigator for lawyers representing relatives of the victims of the September 11th 2001 terrorist attacks in the US.
Brisard, 43, was employed over recent years as an advisor on terrorist issues to several French government departments and, in 2008, President Sarkozy awarded him with the rank of Knight of the French National Order of Merit. He was also a special advisor on economic intelligence for the former Vivendi Universal - now Vivendi - media corporation.
Brisard’s report is based on confidential conversations he held with a French neurosurgeon, Didier Grosskopf, who was once close to Paris-based arms dealer Ziad Takieddine. Between 2004 and 2006, Doctor Grosskopf accompanied the arms dealer on several trips to Libya to treat members of Gaddafi’s family.
Col. Gaddafi and Nicolas Sarkozy.Col. Gaddafi and Nicolas Sarkozy.© Reuters
Takieddine is at the centre of an ongoing judicial investigation into the suspected illegal funding via weapons sales abroad of former French Prime Minister Edouard Balladur’s 1995 presidential election campaign. The Lebanese-born broker was last September placed under investigation, a legal move that is one step short of being charged, for his suspected role in siphoning off commissions paid in arms sales to Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to finance Balladur’s campaign.
Two longstanding friends of Sarkozy, who was Balladur’s budget minister and served as his campaign spokesman, were also placed under investigation last September over their involvement in the suspected scam, which has become dubbed in France as The Karachi Affair (For more on this, see Mediapart's Q&A guide hereand a video presentation here).
But the exclusive revelations of Brisard’s report, published here, relate to Takieddine’s role, between 2002 and 2009, as an advisor and intermediary for weapons contracts mounted by Sarkozy’s inner political team with several Arab countries, and notably Libya. (A list of links to Mediapart investigations into Takieddine’s role with Sarkozy’s team can be found at the end of this article on page 4).
In 1995, Jean-Charles Brisard served as a junior member of Edouard Balladur’s presidential election campaign team. Questioned as a witness in the investigation into the suspected illegal financing of Balladur’s bid, he provided police with a note containing a summary of information potentially relevant to the case, and which included a reference to his report entitled ‘GEN/ NS V. MEMO DG’. This note was added to the evidence collected in the case on October 18th, although the report itself was not handed over to the investigators.
Mediapart has now gained full access to the document, which discloses information given to Brisard by Doctor Grosskopf during a confidential conversation between the two men held on December 20th 2006 in the Swiss town of Lausanne.
The document, an extract of which is precisely copied from the original immediately below here, refers to Nicolas Sarkozy and Ziad Takieddine by their initials, as it does also to the French president’s longserving friend and aide Brice Hortefeux, a former interior minister and currently vice-president of Sarkozy’s ruling UMP party.

http://www.mediapart.fr/journal/international/120312/exclusive-secret-report-describes-gaddafi-funding-sarkozys-2007-electio

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