Tuesday, January 28, 2025

WHY THE IMPERIALISTS TRIED TO WIPE THEM OUT

Gaddafi’s son Saif doubles down on Sarkozy funding claim, alleges pressure to retract

Muammar Gaddafi’s former heir apparent has told FRANCE 24’s sister radio RFI that he was personally involved in giving Nicolas Sarkozy suitcases of cash ahead of his victorious 2007 presidential run. Saif al-Islam claims he was pressured to change his testimony by emissaries of the former French president, who is on trial over alleged campaign financing by Libya.


Interview

 22/01/2025 - 
FRANCE24
By:Benjamin DODMAN

Muammar Gaddafi's son Saif al-Islam (top left) gestures to troops loyal to his father in Tripoli in August 2011, months before the late dictator's fall. 
© Imed Lamloum, AP file photo


Once seen as the respectable, media-friendly face of the Gaddafi regime, Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, the late Libyan dictator’s second son, has been an elusive figure since his father’s fall in 2011, held for years by a rebel group in a mountainous region southwest of Tripoli, before suddenly resurfacing to launch a short-lived presidential run.

In the chaotic 14 years since Gaddafi’s death, Saif al-Islam has spoken just once before with a foreign journalist, weeks before announcing his shot at the presidency in 2021. His written exchanges in Arabic with RFI’s Houda Ibrahim mark the first time he has agreed to touch on the Libyan funding allegations that have dogged Nicolas Sarkozy ever since Gaddafi’s demise.

The RFI journalist first reached out to Saif al-Islam on January 6, the day Sarkozy went on trial in Paris over allegations he accepted money from Libya’s Gaddafi to finance his successful 2007 presidential campaign. The former French president, who served from 2007 to 2012, is facing charges of passive corruption, illegal campaign financing, concealment of embezzlement of public funds and criminal association – punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

Read more Sarkozy on trial: Campaigns, Gaddafi and suitcases full of cash


In his replies to RFI, Saif-al Islam reiterated his earlier allegations that Sarkozy accepted $5 million from the Gaddafi regime in two separate payments, the second of which he said he personally oversaw. He also claimed that members of the former president’s entourage had repeatedly pressured him to change his testimony in the run-up to the trial.

Sarkozy, 69, has vigorously denied the allegations and denounced a “plot” staged by “liars and crooks”, telling the court in Paris: “You will never find one Libyan euro, one Libyan cent in my campaign.”
‘Seal of vengeance’

With his London degrees, fluent English and polite manners, the handsome, bespectacled Saif al-Islam was once seen by many in the West as Libya’s best hope for reform after decades of autocratic rule under his quixotic father.

All that changed in 2011 with his wholehearted support for the Gaddafi regime’s brutal crackdown on Arab Spring protesters, which earned him the hatred of rebel groups and an arrest warrant for crimes against humanity issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC).

That warrant still stands, despite Saif al-Islam’s release from jail in 2017 under an amnesty law passed by one of two competing parliaments spawned by the civil war that followed Gaddafi’s fall.

When Saif-al-Islam last spoke to a Western media outlet in 2021, a decade after his father’s fall, the New York Times described his account of the roots of Libya’s 2011 conflict as “a confluence of long-simmering internal tensions and opportunistic foreign players, including President Nicolas Sarkozy”.

Early in his presidency, Sarkozy had invited Gaddafi to France for a state visit, becoming the first Western leader to do so since the Libyan strongman was ostracised in the 1980s over his role in terrorist attacks.

In 2011, however, he was among the first to push for a military intervention in Libya when pro-democracy protests swept the Arab world. Gaddafi was killed by opposition fighters in October that same year, ending his four-decade rule of the North African country.

As he went on trial this month, Sarkozy argued that the case against him was motivated by vengeance, pointing to the timing of allegations first made by a Libyan news agency in March 2011.

“Revelations about the alleged financing of my campaign came a few hours after my statement that ‘Gaddafi must go’,” he told the court. “What credibility can be given to such statements marked by the seal of vengeance?”
A suitcase bursting with cash

The Libya funding trial involves 11 other defendants, including three former ministers. French investigators have scrutinized several trips to Libya made by people close to Sarkozy, then the interior minister, between 2005 and 2007, including his chief of staff Claude Guéant.

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In his exchanges with RFI, Saif al-Islam said he personally oversaw a payment of $2.5 million to Guéant, claiming that Sarkozy had offered in exchange to overturn a French arrest warrant for Gaddafi’s brother-in-law Abdullah al-Senussi, who was found guilty in absentia of masterminding the 1989 bombing of French airliner DC10 UTA, in which 170 people died.

Saif al-Islam said the money was handed over in suitcases by Gaddafi’s former chief of staff and treasurer Bashir Saleh. Recalling an anecdote first told by Saleh, he noted that one suitcase was so stuffed with cash that Guéant had to stand on it, “which made everyone present laugh”.

A co-defendant in the trial, Gaddafi’s former treasurer sought refuge in France during the Libyan civil war, then moved to South Africa, where he survived a shooting in 2018, before settling in the United Arab Emirates. He has declined to appear in court.

Saif al-Islam added that Sarkozy personally contacted Senussi during a visit to Libya in 2005 and promised to remove him from the Interpol list once he was elected president. He claimed telephone records of the conversation were in Senussi’s possession, though French authorities have never been able to access them.

Hannibal approached

While Saif al-Islam had already detailed his account of the alleged payments in testimony sent to French investigators in 2018, his exchanges with RFI contain previously untold allegations of the pressure he claims Sarkozy’s entourage has exerted on him and his family since then.

Gaddafi’s son said he was first approached by Paris-based consultant Souha al-Bedri, alleging that she asked him to “deny everything that is being said about Libyan support for Sarkozy's campaign” in exchange for help with his appeal against the ICC warrant. He claimed another emissary for the former French president contacted his brother Hannibal, who has spent the past decade in jail in Beirut, promising to have him released if he persuaded his brother to change his testimony.

Saif al-Islam, who refused to identify a third purported Sarkozy emissary, said he “categorically rejected” all approaches.

Contacted by RFI, a lawyer for Hannibal Gaddafi confirmed that his client had been approached in 2022. Bedri, on the other hand, denied she passed on “such a message” to his older brother.

Meanwhile, Sarkozy’s lawyer Christophe Ingrain dismissed Saif al-Islam’s claims as “fanciful” and “unsubstantiated”, denouncing their “opportunistic” timing with the trial now underway.

“For 10 years he (Saif al-Islam) has been promising to hand over documents that would confirm these accusations. To date, nothing has been submitted to the procedure,” Ingrain told FRANCE 24’s sister radio. “So for me these accusations are simply fanciful bragging and have no importance.”

‘Sullied’

Ingrain repeated his client’s contention that such accusations were motivated by “vengeance”, coming from “a man who lost everything after the NATO intervention in Libya that was initiated by Sarkozy”.

The former French president was back in court this week, describing allegations he sealed a pact with Gaddafi in a tent in Tripoli as “grotesque”. Asked whether he had discussed campaign funding during his first meeting with the Libyan dictator in 2005, he said he felt “sullied to have to answer such questions”.

Sarkozy has been convicted in two other scandals, but the Libyan case is the one most likely to affect his legacy.

France’s highest court, the Court of Cassation, last month upheld a conviction of corruption and influence peddling while Sarkozy was head of state, sentencing him to one year under house arrest with an electronic bracelet.

That case was revealed as investigative judges were listening to wiretapped phone conversations during the Libya inquiry. Sarkozy’s latest trial is scheduled to run until April 10, with a verdict expected at a later date.

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