Paris (AFP)
For the first time since the opening of the Bygmalion trial, former President Nicolas Sarkozy appeared at the Paris Criminal Court on Tuesday for his questioning on the excessive spending of his 2012 campaign.
Dressed in a black suit and mask, and a white shirt, he entered the courtroom, looking grave.
Mr. Sarkozy took place on a chair, next to his co-defendants, after having greeted the two representatives of the prosecution with a nod.
At the opening of the hearing and at the request of the president, he got up and took the stand, facing the court.
Nicolas Sarkozy had not attended any hearing since the start of the trial on May 20, and was represented by his historic lawyer, Me Thierry Herzog.
The other defendants - former Bygmalion and UMP executives, campaign manager, accountants - who marched to the bar, are all suspected of being involved to varying degrees in the double billing system imagined to hide the explosion of authorized spending during the presidential candidate's campaign for re-election.
The real price of some 40 meetings organized by the event agency Bygmalion had been drastically reduced, and the rest - 80% of the bills - paid by the UMP (now LR), in the name of fictitious party conventions.
Contrary to the others, returned in particular for swindle or use of forgery, Nicolas Sarkozy is not blamed for this system, and appears for "illegal financing of campaign" only.
He faces one year's imprisonment and a fine of 3,750 euros.
In March, he became the first ex-president of the Fifth Republic to be sentenced to prison (three years, one of which was closed), for corruption and influence peddling in the so-called "wiretapping" affair.
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In the Bygmalion file, "the investigation has not established" according to the accusation that Nicolas Sarkozy could "order", "participate", or even be informed of the system.
But the president-candidate, far from being "disconnected from his campaign", made the choice with his team of "spectacular and expensive meetings", and asked to accelerate the pace - up to one meeting per day.
A campaign "of rare density", marked by a "total improvisation" of the ordering parties, had described the accusation.
For the organizers, an instruction: "It must fart", summed up at the start of the trial the head of meetings at Bygmalion, Franck Attal.
The prosecution believes that Mr. Sarkozy let spending slip, despite several clear alerts on the risk of overruns, and thus "undoubtedly" benefited from fraud, which allowed him to have "much greater means" than what authorized by law: at least 42.8 million in total, nearly double the legal ceiling at the time.
- "Perfectly online" -
To avoid having to publicly admit that his spending had drifted "dramatically", "with the political and financial consequences" that would have followed, says the prosecution, it was decided to "purge" the campaign account. .
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A thesis in which Nicolas Sarkozy does not believe: the price of his meetings was "perfectly in line" with those of his opponent François Hollande, he told investigators.
So, "where did this money go?"
The former secretary general of the UMP Jean-François Cope, cleared in this affair and heard as a simple witness last week, has an idea.
"You always have to ask who benefits," he replied to the court when asked about his "hypothesis" on the question of the trial: who ordered the fraud?
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The sarkozysts and copéistes have always rejected the responsibility for this scandal which caused serial explosions on the right.
When the case was revealed in the press in 2014, Jean-François Cope was first accused of being behind a system created to constitute a "slush fund" dedicated to his political future.
Jérôme Lavrilleux, at the time chief of staff of Mr. Cope and deputy director of the campaign, and only in the UMP to have recognized the fraud, ensures that neither his boss, nor Nicolas Sarkozy, had been put in the current.
The other former executives of the UMP and the campaign, for their part, avoided talking about the former head of state.
"Decisions were taken at the Elysee Palace", we have heard at most.
On the sidelines of the interrogation of campaign director Guillaume Lambert last week, a defense lawyer was surprised: "is someone going to ask a question about Sarkozy at some point?"
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