Beirut (AFP)

The Franco-Lebanese businessman Ziad Takieddine was heard Thursday in Beirut by French magistrates who made the trip, as part of the case of the supposed Libyan financing of Nicolas Sarkozy's presidential campaign in 2007, a source said. judicial.

Mr. Takieddine, who has multiplied the reversals since the start of this affair in 2012, had questioned the former French head of state before turning around in November.

Also targeted by an arrest warrant issued by the French justice for another case, Mr. Takieddine has been living in Lebanon since this summer.

For several hours Thursday morning in Beirut, he had been heard by two investigating judges and a French financial prosecutor, a Lebanese judicial source told AFP.

The hearing, in a room of the Court of Cassation, took place in the presence of a lawyer for Mr. Takieddine and a Lebanese prosecutor who supervised the session, said this source.

"It started this morning. It's going well", confirmed to AFP the French lawyer of Mr. Takieddine, Me Elise Arfi, who was unable to go to Beirut.

Following his about-face clearing Mr. Sarkozy on November 11 in Paris Match and on BFM TV, Mr. Takieddine was summoned for a hearing on November 25 in Paris before the investigating judges, but he did not was not presented.

In December, he accused various investigating magistrates of having incited him to implicate the former French president, statements qualified as "fabrications" by the judges.

Mr. Sarkozy and the former minister Claude Guéant, already prosecuted for several years in this affair, as well as another former minister, Brice Hortefeux, were recently indicted for a new criminal qualification, "criminal association".

The investigation was opened after the publication by Mediapart in 2012, between the two presidential rounds, of a document supposed to prove that the campaign of Mr. Sarkozy had been financed by the regime of Muammar Gaddafi.

Mr. Takieddine, 70, fled to Beirut after being sentenced in June in France to five years in prison in the context of the Karachi case on occult commissions linked to arms contracts with Riyadh and Pakistan , part of which helped finance Edouard Balladur's ill-fated presidential campaign in 1995.

© 2021 AFP