French ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy angrily protested his innocence Thursday after he was charged with corruption over explosive claims that late Libyan dictator Moamer Kadhafi funded his 2007 election campaign. The 63-year-old rightwinger said in his court statement, published by the Figaro newspaper, that he had been through "hell" since the allegations emerged in 2011.
"I stand accused without any tangible evidence," he said, demanding he be treated as a witness rather than a suspect. "In the 24 hours of my detention I have tried with all my might to show that the serious corroborating evidence required to charge someone did not exist."
The allegations that Sarkozy took money from Kadhafi - whom he helped to topple in 2011 - are the most serious out of myriad investigations dogging him since he left office in 2012. Judges decided they had enough evidence to charge the combative one-term president Wednesday after five years of investigation and two days of questioning in police custody in the Paris suburb of Nanterre.
Sarkozy, who served as president from 2007 to 2012, was charged with corruption, illegal campaign financing and concealment of Libyan public money, a judiciary source told AFP. "I've been living the hell of this slander since March 11, 2011," when the allegations first emerged, Sarkozy said. He went as far as to blame "the controversy launched by Kadhafi and his henchmen" for his failure to win re-election in 2012, when Francois Hollande, a Socialist, took the presidency.
Sarkozy will have six months to appeal the charges, and judges will have to make a further decision about whether they have sufficient proof to take the case to trial. Since 2013, investigators have been looking into claims by several figures in Kadhafi's ousted regime, including his son Seif al-Islam, that Sarkozy's campaign received cash from the dictator. A few months after his 2007 election Sarkozy gave Kadhafi the red-carpet treatment during a state visit which critics denounced as an attempt to rehabilitate an international pariah long accused of human rights abuses.
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