Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy was due to appear before an examining magistrate in Bordeaux on Thursday to respond to charges that his 2007 electoral campaign was financed with funds secured illegally from France’s richest woman.
In a case that could wreck the 57-year-old’s hopes of a political comeback, Sarkozy is suspected of taking financial advantage of elderly L’Oreal heiress Liliane Bettencourt at a time when she was too frail to fully understand what she was doing.
Examining magistrate Jean-Michel Gentil is expected to spend most of the day quizzing Sarkozy about how he obtained funding from Bettencourt.
Judicial sources have told AFP that the 57-year-old could be formally indicted on a charge of taking advantage of someone in a position of weakness, although the magistrate also has the option of interrogating him as a witness under caution.
Bettencourt is now 90 years old and has been in poor health since 2006. The allegation against Sarkozy is two-fold: that the money obtained from her took his campaign financing over legal limits and that it had been secured without her full knowledge or consent.
This latter claim was made by Bettencourt’s former accountant, Claire Thibout in 2010. She told police that she had handed 150,000 euros in cash to Bettencourt’s right-hand man, Patrice de Maistre, on the understanding it was to be passed on to Sarkozy’s campaign treasurer, Eric Woerth.
Maistre, one of the biggest backers of Sarkozy’s UMP party, withdrew a total of four million euros in cash from Bettencourt’s Swiss bank account in seven instalments between 2007 and 2009.
