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The French former interior minister had to respond to a judge on Saturday for his possible involvement in the alleged funding of the 2007 presidential electoral campaign by Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.
The police arrested and interrogated Claude Guéant on Friday morning, asking about the mysterious transfer of over US$500,000 to his bank account from a foreign one. When it was revealed in 2013, Guéant claimed that “this money [had] nothing to do with Libya” but came from the sale of two paintings in 2008. Several experts had then asserted that the paintings mentioned by Guéant could never have reached such a price.
French authorities have suspected that Sarkozy's electoral campaign was illegally funded since the release, between the two rounds of the presidential elections of April 2012, of a 2006 document by investigative journal Mediapart. Sarkozy claimed the document was not authentic – it evoked a prior financial agreement with Gaddafi – but experts contradicted him later, only proving that Gaddafi meant to fund Sarkozy, but may have not done it in the end.
In the past two years, Guéant has already been arrested in two other judicial cases that have not received a final sentence yet; he could be involved in no less than seven procedures in total, calculated Le Monde in a recent article.
Guéant’s notorious links with Libyan officials had already proven crucial in the past, such as the high-profile case of the Bulgarian nurses. Among them, Bachir Saleh, a former Gaddafi's aide, is currently living in South Africa and also expected to be heard at the French court in the case of electoral campaign funding.
Gaddafi was killed in October 2011, a few months after Sarkozy and his NATO partners launched a war against Libya.
See more: France: Former Sarkozy's Aide Arrested Over Gaddafi Funding Investigation
Libyan City Sues France for Support of Anti-Gaddafi Militias
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