PARIS: Prosecutors have recommended that French ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy stand trial over alleged illegal campaign financing, legal sources said Monday, in a potentially major blow to his bid for re-election next year.
The 61-year-old Sarkozy, who was president from 2007-2012, had seen his poll ratings rise recently after taking a hard-line on Islam and immigration following a truck massacre in Nice in July which saw 86 people killed.
The campaign financing case, one of several investigations which have dogged Sarkozy since leaving office, involves allegedly false accounting used in 2012 to conceal campaign overspending by his office.
Sarkozy’s lawyer Thierry Herzog, reacting to news the prosecution had recommended a trial, dismissed the development as a “shoddy new political maneuver” that would not withstand scrutiny.
“Two years of investigation have shown (Sarkozy’s) total lack of involvement” in the affair, Herzog said in a statement.
An investigating magistrate must now decide whether to order a trial, with a decision possible as early as the end of this month — just as the right-wing Republicans party is preparing to choose its presidential candidate.
Sarkozy’s chief rival in the Republican primaries, set for November 20 and 27, is 71-year-old former premier and Bordeaux mayor Alain Juppe, who is seen as a moderate.
The outcome of France’s election in April and May next year is seen as difficult to forecast.
Socialist President Francois Hollande, suffering historically low ratings due to high unemployment and a string of terror attacks, is yet to say if he will seek re-election.
Both the Socialists and the Republicans, France’s traditional parties, have seen support steadily eroded by the far-right National Front and they might also face challenges from independents, such as former economy minister Emmanuel Macron.
Sarkozy has positioned himself on the right of the Republican party and has waded into a recent heated national debate over the burkini, speaking out in favor of a short-lived ban on the Muslim body-concealing swimsuit.
The campaign financing case hinges on the activity of public relations firm Bygmalion, which organized some of Sarkozy’s campaign appearances in 2012 in his doomed bid for a second term.
Bygmalion allegedly charged 18.5 million euros ($20.7 million) to Sarkozy’s party — then called the UMP, but since renamed The Republicans — instead of billing the president’s re-election campaign.
As a result, the campaign was able to greatly exceed a spending limit of 22.5 million euros, according to the prosecution.
There are 13 other potential defendants in the case including campaign officials and Bygmalion employees.
Bygmalion executives have acknowledged the existence of fraud and false billing, but no one has directly accused Sarkozy of having been aware or taken decisions about it.
However, the former president’s campaign director, Guillaume Lambert, has told police he warned Sarkozy of the risk of breaching financing limits.
Questioned by police in September 2015, Sarkozy said he did not remember the warning, and described the controversy as a “farce,” putting the responsibility squarely on Bygmalion and the UMP.
While the campaign financing case is currently the most pressing, Sarkozy has been fighting legal problems on several fronts.
He still faces accusations of conspiring with his lawyer to bribe a magistrate in exchange for inside information on a separate corruption probe.
In the most sensational case against him, Sarkozy was cleared in October 2013 of accepting campaign donations in 2007 from France’s richest woman, L’Oreal heiress Liliane Bettencourt, when she was too frail to know what she was doing.
The son of a Hungarian immigrant father, Sarkozy was nicknamed the “bling-bling” president for his flashy displays of wealth.
After his humiliating 2012 defeat by Hollande, Sarkozy famously promised that “you won’t hear about me anymore” before he embarked the international conference circuit.
Few observers were surprised though when he returned to frontline politics in 2014, standing for and winning the leadership of the then UMP.
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French prosecutors seek trial for Sarkozy
French prosecutors seek trial for Sarkozy
Huge cache of Epstein documents includes emails financier exchanged with wealthy and powerful
- The documents were disclosed under the Epstein Files Transparency Act
- “Today’s release marks the end of a very comprehensive document identification and review process to ensure transparency to the American people,” Blanche said
WASHINGTON: A huge new tranche of files on millionaire financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein released Friday revealed details of his communications with the wealthy and powerful, some not long before he died by suicide in 2019.
The Justice Department said it was disclosing more than 3 million pages of documents, as well as thousands of videos and photos, as required by a law passed by Congress. By Friday evening, more than 600,000 documents had been published online. Millions of files that prosecutors had identified as potentially subject to release under the law remain under wraps, however, drawing criticism from Democrats.
Here's what we know so far about the files now being reviewed by a team of Associated Press reporters:
Epstein talked politics with Steve Bannon and an ex-Obama official
The documents show Epstein exchanged hundreds of friendly texts with Steve Bannon, a top adviser to President Donald Trump, some months before Epstein's death.
They discussed politics, travel and a documentary Bannon was said to be planning that would help salvage Epstein's reputation.
In March 2019, Bannon asked Epstein if he could supply his plane to pick him up in Rome.
A couple of months later, Epstein messaged to Bannon, “Now you can understand why trump wakes up in the middle of the night sweating when he hears you and I are friends.”
The context is unclear from the documents, which were released with many redactions and little clear organization.
Another 2018 exchange focused on Trump’s threats at the time to oust Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, whom he had named to the post just the year prior.
Around the same time, Epstein also communicated with Kathy Ruemmler, a lawyer and former Obama White House official. In a typo-filled email, he warned that Democrats should stop demonizing Trump as a Mafia-type figure even as he derided the president as a “maniac.”
Bannon did not immediately respond to a message from the AP seeking comment. Ruemmler said through a spokesperson she was associated with Epstein professionally during her time as a lawyer in private practice and now “regrets ever knowing him.”
He also chatted with Elon Musk and Howard Lutnick about island visits
Billionaire Tesla founder Elon Musk e-mailed Epstein in 2012 and 2013 about visiting his infamous island compound, the scene of many allegations of sexual abuse.
Epstein inquired in an email about how many people Musk would like flown by helicopter, and Musk responded that it would likely be just him and his partner at the time. “What day/night will be the wildest party on =our island?” he wrote, according to the Justice Department records.
It’s not immediately clear if the island visits took place. Spokespersons for Musk’s companies, Tesla and X, didn’t immediately respond to emails seeking comment Friday.
Musk has maintained that he repeatedly turned down the disgraced financier’s overtures. “Epstein tried to get me to go to his island and I REFUSED,” he posted on X in 2025
Epstein also invited Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to the island in Dec. 2012. Lutnick's wife enthusiastically accepted the invitation and said they would arrive on a yacht with their children. The two also had drinks on another occasion in 2011, according to a schedule. Six years later, they e-mailed about the construction of a building across the street from both of their homes.
Lutnick has distanced himself from Epstein, calling him “gross” and saying in 2025 that he cut ties decades ago. He didn’t respond to an e-mailed request for comment on Friday afternoon.
The records also have new details on Epstein's incarceration and suicide
Epstein was arrested on federal sex trafficking charges in July 2019, and found dead in his cell just over a month later.
The latest batch of documents includes emails between investigators about Epstein’s death, including an investigator's observation that his final communication doesn't look like a suicide note. Multiple investigations have determined that Epstein's death was a suicide.
The records also detail a trick that jail staffers used to fool the media gathered outside while Epstein’s body was removed: they used boxes and sheets to create what appeared to be a body and loaded it into a white van labeled as belonging to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.
The reporters followed the van when it left the jail, not knowing that Epstein’s actual body was loaded into a black vehicle, which departed “unnoticed,” according to the interview notes.
