Paris
French President Nicolas Sarkozy has dismissed a report that deposed Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi had sought to fund his 2007 campaign as a ploy by Socialist opponents to distract attention from the public reappearance of disgraced IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn.
A week ahead of Sunday’s decisive second-round presidential vote, investigative website Mediapart said it had uncovered a document from Libya’s former secret services showing that Gaddafi’s government had decided to finance Sarkozy’s run at the presidency when he was interior minister.
Sarkozy, whose government played a key role in the demise of Gaddafi, has repeatedly denied receiving any money from the former Libyan leader, who was captured and killed by fighters from the Libyan National Liberation Army last year.
Sarkozy said the Socialists were using the report as an attempt to distract attention from the reappearance of Strauss-Kahn, who had been the runaway favourite for the party’s presidential ticket before he was arrested last May on charges of sexually abusing a New York hotel maid.
In an interview published by London’s Guardian newspaper on Friday, Strauss-Kahn said operatives linked to Sarkozy had torpedoed his presidential bid by ensuring his sexual encounter with the maid was made public.
“You see that this is an attempt to create a distraction after the return to public life of Strauss-Kahn,” Sarkozy told Le Parisien-Dimanche newspaper. “They don’t want anyone to remember they wanted to make him the next president of the French republic.”
The Socialists’ candidate, Francois Hollande, leads Sarkozy in opinion polls by around 10 percentage points ahead of the second-round vote.
Mediapart, staffed by a number of veteran French newspaper and news agency journalists, said it had a 2006 document signed by Gaddafi’s former intelligence chief, Moussa Koussa, which stated that his government would pay e50 million (R511m) for Sarkozy’s campaign.
Later yesterday, in an interview on Canal+ television, Sarkozy said the document was a fake.
“It’s a disgrace. It’s a fabrication,” he said. “Mediapart is a habitual liar… It is an office in the service of the Left… Who led the coalition to topple Gaddafi? It was France! I was perhaps the leader. Do you think that if Gaddafi had anything on me I would have tried to oust him?”
Prime Minister Francois Fillon said the document was “false, or at least impossible to verify, which comes from a dictatorship which France helped to topple”.
“It is a calumny, an absurdity,” he told Europe 1 radio, adding that it was ridiculous to talk of e50m to finance a campaign that cost e20m and for which accounts were publicly available.
The Mediapart website, which gained prominence in 2010 when it broke news of a major political funding scandal around Sarkozy’s UMP party and L’Oréal heiress Liliane Bettencourt, called for an official investigation.
Having earlier denied it, Sarkozy acknowledged on Wednesday that his government had considered co-operation with Libya in civil nuclear energy. He raised eyebrows when he invited Gaddafi to Paris in 2007. – letting him pitch his Bedouin-style tent by the Élysée Palace.
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