PARIS: Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy wants authorities to drop an investigation into alleged illegal financing of his 2007 campaign by the regime of late Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi, after a central accuser backtracked on claims that he had handed Sarkozy’s team suitcases of Libyan cash.
Sarkozy, who denies wrongdoing, has facecd preliminary corruption charges in the case, under investigation since 2013.
The probe gained traction when French-Lebanese businessman Ziad Takieddine told news site Mediapart in 2016 that he had delivered suitcases from Libya containing €5 million ($6.2 million) in cash to Sarkozy and his former chief of staff.
The ex-president jumped on the first reports from BFM TV and Paris Match saying: “The truth is out at last.”
On Wednesday, Takieddine reversed course, telling BFM television from Lebanon: “It’s not true. Mr. Sarkozy did not receive financing ... there was no financing of Sarkozy’s presidential campaign.”
Sarkozy released a statement late Wednesday on social networks saying: “The truth is emerging at last ... he never gave me money, there was never illegal financing of my 2007 campaign.”
Sarkozy said he would ask investigators to drop the charges against him, and sue Takieddine for defamation.
“For seven-and-a-half years, the investigation has not discovered the slightest proof of any illegal financing whatsoever,” he posted on Facebook.
“The chief accuser recognizes his lies,” Sarkozy added. “He never gave me money, there was never illegal financing of my campaign in 2007.”
Investigators are examining claims that Qaddafi’s regime secretly gave Sarkozy €50 million overall for his winning 2007 French campaign. The sum would be more than double the legal campaign funding limit at the time, €21 million, and would violate French rules against foreign campaign financing.
Sarkozy’s relationship with Qaddafi was complicated. In 2007, Sarkozy welcomed Qaddafi to France with high honors. Sarkozy then put France at the forefront of NATO-led airstrikes that helped rebel fighters topple Qaddafi’s regime in 2011.
Sarkozy and Takieddine have faced other legal troubles in France. The former president faces trial later this month in an unrelated corruption case.
Takieddine, who is in Beirut on the run from French justice in another shady financing affair, put out a video saying the instructing magistrate had twisted his words.
“I am saying loud and clear the magistrate ... really wanted to turn it the way he wanted and make me say things which are totally contradictory to what I said,” the 70-year-old said.
“There was no financing of Sarkozy’s presidential campaign,” he added.
Sarkozy announced he would instruct his lawyers to seek to halt the case against him and sue Takieddine for defamation.
French prosecutors last month said they had charged Sarkozy for “membership in a criminal conspiracy” after more than 40 hours of questioning over four days, prosecutors told AFP.
It adds to charges already filed in 2018 of “accepting bribes,” “benefitting from embezzled public funds” and “illegal campaign financing.”
The October charge was seen to increase the chance of a trial for Sarkozy, who was already poised to become the first former French president in the dock on corruption charges.
Prosecutors suspected that Sarkozy and his associates received tens of millions of euros from Qaddafi’s regime to help finance his election bid.
Sarkozy, who was president from 2007 to 2012, has always denied wrongdoing.
He has been under pressure since 2012, when the investigative website Mediapart published a document purporting to show that Qaddafi agreed to give Sarkozy up to €50 million ($59 million at current rates).
But four years later, in 2011, Sarkozy was a driving force behind the international military invention that drove Qaddafi from power.
A trained lawyer, Sarkozy has fought the claims of Libya cash by citing presidential immunity, and arguing there is no legal basis in France for prosecuting someone for misusing funds from a foreign country.
He has faced a litany of legal woes since leaving office, including charges relating to fake invoices orchestrated by executives of the Bygmalion public relations firm to mask overspending on his failed 2012 re-election campaign.
In a third case, Sarkozy faces charges of trying to obtain classified information from a judge on an inquiry into claims that he accepted illicit payments from L’Oreal heiress Liliane Bettencourt for his 2007 presidential campaign.
Sarkozy was cleared over the Bettencourt allegations in 2013.
Sarkozy seeks closure of Libyan corruption case as witness drops claim
https://arab.news/2qmkd
Sarkozy seeks closure of Libyan corruption case as witness drops claim
Pro-Palestinian protesters arrested after occupying University of Washington building
- Students demanded that the university sever all ties with Boeing, including returning any Boeing donations and barring the company’s employees from teaching
- The arrests come amid a Trump administration crackdown on international students who took part in pro-Palestinian protests at US colleges and universities
SEATTLE: Police arrested about 30 pro-Palestinian protesters who occupied a University of Washington engineering building and demanded the school break ties with Boeing.
Students from the group Super UW moved into the Interdisciplinary Engineering Building in Seattle on Monday evening and unofficially renamed it after Shaban Al-Dalou, a teenage engineering student who was killed along with his mother after an Israeli airstrike caused an inferno outside of a Gaza hospital.
The students demanded that the university sever all ties with Boeing, including returning any Boeing donations and barring the company’s employees from teaching at or otherwise influencing the school. Boeing has a factory in nearby Renton that makes commercial and military aircraft, according to its website.
“We’re hoping to remove the influence of Boeing and other manufacturing companies from our educational space, period, and we’re hoping to expose the repressive tactics of the university,” Super UW spokesperson Eric Horford told KOMO News.
Another group dressed in black blocked the front of the building with furniture and used dumpsters to block nearby Jefferson Road.
UW police worked with Seattle police to clear the building at around 10:30 p.m., UW spokesperson Victor Balta said in a statement. About 30 people were taken into custody and charged with trespassing, property destruction and disorderly conduct, he said. Their cases will be referred to the King County prosecutors.
Any students identified will be referred to the Student Conduct Office, Balta said.
The arrests come amid a Trump administration crackdown on international students who took part in pro-Palestinian protests at US colleges and universities.
More than 1,000 students at 160 colleges, universities and university systems have had their visas revoked or their legal status terminated since late March, according to an Associated Press review of university statements, correspondence with school officials and court records.
Appeals court to hear cases of 2 university students, one detained, the other recently released
- Immigration court proceedings for Ozturk and Mahdawi are being conducted separately
- The appeals court paused that order last week in order to consider the government’s motion
NEW YORK: A federal appeals court is scheduled to hear arguments Tuesday in the cases of a Turkish Tufts University student who has been detained by immigration authorities for six weeks and a Palestinian student at Columbia University who was recently released from detention.
A three-judge panel of the US 2nd Circurt Court of Appeals, based in New York, is expected to hear motions filed by the US Justice Department regarding Rumeysa Ozturk and Mohsen Mahdawi. The department is appealing decisions made by two federal judges in Vermont. It also wants to consolidate the students’ cases, saying they present similar legal questions.
Immigration court proceedings for Ozturk and Mahdawi are being conducted separately.
A district court judge in Vermont had ordered that Ozturk, a 30-year-old doctoral student, be brought to the state from a Louisiana immigration detention center by May 1 for hearings to determine whether she was illegally detained. Ozturk’s lawyers say her detention violates her constitutional rights, including free speech and due process.
The appeals court paused that order last week in order to consider the government’s motion.
Congress limited federal-court jurisdiction over immigration matters, the Justice Department said. It said an immigration court in Louisiana has jurisdiction over Ozturk’s case.
Immigration officials surrounded Ozturk as she walked along a street in a Boston suburb March 25 and drove her to New Hampshire and Vermont before putting her on a plane to the detention center in Basile, Louisiana.
Ozturk was one of four students who wrote an op-ed in the campus newspaper, The Tufts Daily, last year criticizing the university’s response to student activists demanding that Tufts “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide,” disclose its investments and divest from companies with ties to Israel.
A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said in March, without providing evidence, that investigations found that Ozturk engaged in activities in support of Hamas, a US-designated terrorist group.
The government is also challenging another judge’s decision to release Mahdawi from detention in Vermont on April 30. Mahdawi led protests at Columbia University against Israel’s war in Gaza. He was arrested by immigration officials during an interview about finalizing his US citizenship.
Mahdawi, 34, has been a legal permanent resident for 10 years. He was in a Vermont state prison since April 14. In his release order, US District Judge Geoffrey Crawford said Mahdawi has raised a “substantial claim that the government arrested him to stifle speech with which it disagrees.”
Mahdawi’s release allows him to travel outside his home state of Vermont and attend graduation next month in New York. He recently completed coursework at Columbia and planned to begin a master’s degree program there in the fall.
PM Carney tells Trump Canada is ‘not for sale’
- Carney, speaking in front of reporters alongside Trump at the White House, said Canada was ‘not for sale, won’t be ever’
WASHINGTON: Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney on Tuesday told his US counterpart Donald Trump that Canada was not for sale and would not become the 51st state of the United States.
Carney, speaking in front of reporters alongside Trump at the White House, said Canada was “not for sale, won’t be ever.”
Ukraine’s Zelensky says Russian artillery fire has not subsided
KYIV: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Saturday that, according to his top commander, Russian artillery fire had not subsided despite the Kremlin’s proclamation of an Easter ceasefire.
“As of now, according to the Commander-in-Chief reports, Russian assault operations continue on several frontline sectors, and Russian artillery fire has not subsided,” Zelensky wrote on the social media platform X.
“Therefore, there is no trust in words coming from Moscow.”
He recalled that Russia had last month rejected a US-proposed full 30-day ceasefire and said that if Moscow agreed to “truly engage in a format of full and unconditional silence, Ukraine will act accordingly — mirroring Russia’s actions.”
“If a complete ceasefire truly takes hold, Ukraine proposes extending it beyond the Easter day of April 20,” Zelensky wrote.
Kyiv calls on foreign troops not to take part in Russia’s May 9 parade
- “The Russian army has committed and continues to commit atrocities in Ukraine,” Kyiv’s foreign ministry said
- “These people are not liberators of Europe, they are occupiers and war criminals“
KYIV: Ukraine warned Tuesday against any foreign troop participation in Russia’s May 9 parade to mark 80 years since the defeat of Nazi Germany, saying it would be “unacceptable” and seen as helping Moscow “whitewash its war crimes.”
A handful of countries have in recent years sent their militaries to take part in Russia’s traditional May 9 parade — a showpiece event that has become the country’s most important public holiday under President Vladimir Putin’s quarter-century in power.
“The Russian army has committed and continues to commit atrocities in Ukraine on a scale that Europe has not seen since World War II,” Kyiv’s foreign ministry said.
“It is this army that will march on Red Square in Moscow on May 9. These people are not liberators of Europe, they are occupiers and war criminals.”
Kyiv said marching with Russian soldiers would be considered as “sharing responsibility” for Moscow’s actions during its three-year Ukraine invasion.
“To march side by side with them is to share responsibility for the blood of murdered Ukrainian children, civilians and military, not to honor the victory over Nazism.”
Ukraine was one of the most devastated countries during World War II, with Kyiv saying it “touched every Ukrainian family.”
The foreign ministry also said that six million Ukrainians fought in the Red Army — with five million Ukrainian civilians killed and three million Ukrainian troops.
Russian leader Vladimir Putin attributed the victory over Nazism in Europe as a feat primarily achieved by the Russian nation.
Central Asian troops have often taken part in the Moscow parade.
The Kremlin has this year not ruled out that North Korean soldiers could take part for the first time, after Pyongyang’s troops helped Moscow oust Ukrainian soldiers from Russia’s Kursk region.
