Former President Nicolas Sarkozy did not attend the hearing on Monday related to the Boksan accounts, through which €500,000 of Libyan origin allegedly passed to his former secretary-general.
The trial on the Libyan financing of Nicolas Sarkozy’s presidential campaign is now in its sixth week. There is still one month of hearings left, but the examination of the facts and the questioning of the accused are coming to an end. President Olivier Géron has asked the civil parties to start thinking about the order of their pleadings; these are scheduled to begin on May 4, followed by the speeches of the attorneys general and the defense pleadings, scheduled until May 27. The debates will then be closed, and the court will reach its decision.
Before that, there are still some “formalities” to complete. The examination of the personalities of the eleven accused will take place next week, and President Géron plans to use this sequence to confront Nicolas Sarkozy’s positions one last time with those of his former minister Brice Hortefeux and his former collaborator Claude Guéant.
Claude Guéant, who served as his chief of staff at the Ministry of the Interior, his secretary-general at the Elysee, and his Minister of the Interior, was exempted from the hearing for medical reasons. For similar reasons, the lower court had exempted him from house arrest, despite the six-year prison sentence imposed on him last September.
But it’s possible that Claude Guéant will speak again through his lawyers, as he did unexpectedly and forcefully last week. “You shouldn’t mess with Claude Guéant. If he were to be attacked again, he would react,” his lawyer, Philippe Bouchez El Ghozi, threatened in no uncertain terms on RTL radio.
The week before, this advocate had swayed the opinion in Nicolas Sarkozy’s camp by reading a three-page letter during the hearing in which “the cardinal” – Claude Guéant’s nickname during his heyday – responded to his former boss’s accusations. This was the first time Nicolas Sarkozy had expressed serious doubts about the integrity of his former colleague. On April 14, the former head of state described him as a sort of Janus, a workaholic, and expressed surprise at the €500,000 of Libyan money that Guéant is suspected of having received and reinvested in a Paris apartment.
The next hearing will be crucial for Sarkozy’s lawyers, following the revelations made by Guéant and the challenging position they find themselves in since the “Claude, see to it” statement. The courtroom drama continues to unfold in the ongoing case.
