Gaddafi's son opens up about Sarkozy funding

The youngest son of former Libyan dictator Muammarr Gaddafi claims he was pressured to retract allegations about his country's funding of Nicolas Sarkozy's 2007 Presidential campaign. In an interview with RFI, Saif al-Islam Gaddafi describes being approached three times to change testimony he gave to French investigators in 2018 – when he says he oversaw cash payments of $5m to the former French President's team. 'Sarkozy has exercised pressure on me through intermediaries several times,’ Gaddafi said in his first comments about the ‘Libyan financing affair’ since 2011. Gaddafi said the pressure from Sarkozy began after his 2018 testimony to investigating Judge Serge Tournaire. The first attempt allegedly came in 2021 through the Paris-based consultant Souha al-Bedri, who asked him to deny all claims of Libyan support for Sarkozy's campaign in exchange for help resolving his case with the International Criminal Court (ICC), where he remains wanted. Al-Bedri rejected these claims, calling them ‘absolutely not true’.

In late 2022, a second approach allegedly came through Noël Dubus, an Ivorian national already implicated in both the campaign funding case and the Karachi arms contracts affair. According to Gaddafi, Dubus visited his imprisoned brother Hannibal in Beirut, promising his release in exchange for altered testimony. RFI reports that a third attempt allegedly came through an unnamed French person of Arab origin, who Gaddafi specified was neither Alexandre Djouhri nor Ziad Takieddine, two key figures already implicated in the investigation. Gaddafi said he refused all attempts to alter his testimony. According to Gaddafi, the Libyan regime made two separate payments to Sarkozy of $2.5m each. The first was meant to finance Sarkozy's election campaign in exchange for promised ‘agreements and projects in favour of Libya’. The second payment was allegedly intended to end legal proceedings over the 1989 UTA airline bombing that killed 170 people, including 54 French citizens. The regime also sought to remove six Libyan names from Interpol notices, including that of Abdullah Senoussi, Gaddafi's intelligence chief and brother-in-law.