"I vigorously contest any criminal responsibility, because I deny – and I hope to demonstrate it – that I ever knew of fraud, never asked for fraud or even benefited from fraud," Sarkozy said at the start of his questioning on Friday (November 24th) before the Paris Court of Appeal which is examining the Bygmalion case.

"If I didn't ask for anything, if I wasn't aware of it, where is the intentional crime?" asked the former president of the Republic (2007-2012), wearing a dark suit, saying a little later that he had been "a thousand miles away from imagining that there was a system of false invoices".

"I want the truth," he continued, pugnacious in the face of the president's questions, while acknowledging that he had "not convinced so far".

Retried since 8 November alongside nine other people who have appealed, partially or in full, their conviction in September 2021, Nicolas Sarkozy had so far only appeared on the first day of the trial.

The criminal court had stressed in its judgment that the former tenant of the Élysée had "continued the organisation of meetings" for elections, "asking for one meeting per day", even though he "had been warned in writing" of the risk of legal exceedance, then of the actual exceedance.

"Reconstruction a posteriori"

As in the first trial, the ex-president accused people close to his rival Jean-François Copé (Jérôme Lavrilleux, who was deputy director of the campaign team, and the Bygmalion communications agency) of having enriched themselves, disputing the fact that his campaign had gone into overdrive.

"I formally contest the term runaway, which does not correspond to anything!" said Nicolas Sarkozy. "I've never seen a campaign where there's not one event a day," he said later, with machine-gun delivery and grand gestures.

He denounced "the lie of a campaign that is going crazy". "This is the only explanation that the defendants have found to explain the flood of money into their company and into their pockets," he said, adding: "If there had been caviar distributed, extraordinary mechanisms, why doesn't the press talk about it?"

"It's an absurdity, an a posteriori reconstruction to explain how the money could have leaked from all sides," he insisted, firing several arrows in the direction of Jean-François Copé and accusing Jérôme Lavrilleux of being behind this "construction", "the only explanation for the embezzlement" according to him.

During previous interrogations, the former director general of Bygmalion, Guy Alves, considered that Nicolas Sarkozy had ultimately been the "sole beneficiary" of the system of false invoices, an opinion shared by Jérôme Lavrilleux, who said on Thursday that everything had been done "for the benefit of the candidate".

This case is in addition to other legal troubles for Nicolas Sarkozy: he was sentenced last May in the wiretapping case to three years in prison, one of which is suspended, a decision against which he has appealed to the Court of Cassation. In this regard, a recent decision by the Constitutional Council that censures a procedural rule could benefit him.

The legal cases surrounding Nicolas Sarkozy © Simon MALFATTO / AFP

The former head of state will appear in court in 2025 on suspicion of Libyan financing of his victorious 2007 presidential campaign. He was also indicted at the beginning of October in connection with the retraction of the intermediary Ziad Takieddine.

With AFP

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