The French outlet Mediapart revealed that the Lebanese Judiciary has found itself in the middle of a French fiasco around the funding of former French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s presidential campaign of 2007.
Former President Sarkozy is accused of having received money from his Lybian counterpart, Mouammar Gaddafi, in order to finance his political campaign.
This affair was exposed by Mediapart in 2012, where Sarkozy supposedly received 50 million euros for the financing of his campaign.
Today more information has surfaced regarding Sarkozy’s financial deals with Gaddafi, and this one involved the Lebanese judiciary, which Mediapart is now accusing of corruption.
According to Mediapart, a French intermediary worked through an intermediary close to Hezbollah, Ali S, to engage with the Lebanese Judiciary in the 2015 kidnapping case of Mouammar Gaddafi’s son, Hannibal Gaddafi.
The judges were asked to facilitate an agreement for the release of Hannibal who was being held hostage in Lebanon by an armed group. The group was demanding to know the whereabouts of cleric Musa al-Sadr who had disappeared in Lybia in 1978.
The Lebanese judges, one of whom is a member of the Higher Judicial Council, were promised one million dollars in exchange for their involvement in the release of Hannibal; also according to Mediapart.
The French intermediary linked to Nicolas Sarkozy dealt with the release of Hannibal in exchange for Gaddafi’s denial of any financing from his part in Sarkozy’s campaign, a case that was on trial during that time.
Nicolas Sarkozy is known for his recurrent problems with justice. He has been sentenced in September to 3 years of jail for illegally financing his electoral campaign of 2012, but the sentence was reduced to 1 year only.
Sarkozy will not spend his jail sentence in prison but comfortably at home, since the political class is above the law in France too.
He was allowed to request that his prison term be instead served at home with an electronic bracelet.