After he swore that he had not received the slightest gift from the French-Algerian businessman and mediator, Alexandre Gouhari, former French Interior Minister Claude Gueant admitted, under pressure of evidence, to receiving a valuable watch and a large sum of cash from this broker in a matter related to a high-ranking Libyan figure.
And the French website Mediapart said
in a report
that the former Minister of the Interior under President Nicolas Sarkozy, who categorically denied before the investigative judge Aude Pressy, in December 2020, that he had received any gifts of any kind from Alexandre Djohri, He finally admitted receiving a watch worth 11,000 euros from Johari in 2006, and 500,000 euros in 2008, and is therefore considered today one of the main heroes in the Libyan financing case.
However, 4 months before this official announcement before the judge, Gueant himself contacted the Euro Peace d'Or store, to sell a valuable Patek Philippe watch, and received in return the amount of 6,105 euros that was transferred to his bank account, and when the police learned of the deal, they contacted the Patek Philippe company. It was reported that the watch was bought by Alexander Djohri for about 11,000 euros in 2006.
Didn't even occur to us
On the basis of this information, the investigative judge summoned Sarkozy's lieutenant again on April 16 for clarification, forcing Claude Gueant to admit receiving the watch with 500,000 euros, and told the judge, "Alexander Djouhri actually gave me this watch as a gift. It was a gift from someone I told you years ago." I feel sympathy for him, even friendship for nothing."
"I think it was a nice watch, but the bill was not included. I don't know the price. I can assure you that I don't remember the exact moment anymore. It is simply a gift that has no other motive than a gesture of friendship."
Gyan said that when he said at the end of 2020 that he had never received the slightest gift from Johari, "it was simply because the story of the episode of the hour had not crossed our minds." However, at the end of the hearing, the investigative judge indicted him a new indictment for "passive corruption." , a list added to the previous nine charges that targeted him in the Libyan case.
Mediapart indicated that Claude Gueant appears at every stage of the Libyan financing case, and at the heart of the two main channels of alleged corruption exposed by the courts. As he appeared with the mediator Jawhari, he also intervened with the European Air Defense and Space Company, in order to pay large commissions to Jawhari on the sidelines The sale of Airbus aircraft to the Libyan regime, and the company's executives confirmed this.
a kilo of gold
In addition to the watch that Johari presented, the police discovered - according to the site - that Gyan also sold, in March 2020, to the National Gold Corporation, a gold ingot weighing one kilogram for 40,000 euros, stamped with Russian words related to the “central bank.” He said before the judge that Sergey Pugachev, a former Russian senator who is close to Putin, presented it to him, and the facts, according to the investigation, date back to 2006.
"He gave this to me on a visit to my office. There was no barter," Gueant explained, noting that Pugachev was interested in taking over the French newspaper France Soir - which he had already bought - and wanted to ensure that its editorial line was in the interest of the then-future presidential candidate. Nicolas Sarkozy.
And now - says Mediapart - investigators have become aware of the existence of the watch presented by Johari and the Russian kilo of gold, in the context of another file related to the funds of the Ministry of the Interior, where Gueant and other senior Sarkozy officials were convicted of embezzlement, in a case related to years of embezzlement of the costs of the Ministry's monetary investigation, and included Sentenced to pay a fine of €75,000 and jointly pay €210,000 in compensation with the other convicts, as of September 2020, only €13,000 had been paid.