Sarkozy-Kadafi first appeared in the media in March 2011. The movement that began in January in demonstrations and clashes on the opposition street had become a spring war. The Tripoli regime was crumbling and, among the Western powers, France threatened to bomb Libya by air. Then Muammar al Kadafi said in a television interview: “I have helped Sarkozy take power. I gave him the money I needed to get to the presidency. He came here, visited me in my cloth shop when I was an Interior Minister, and asked me for help.”

If there has since been much mention in France of the alleged financing of the Sarkozy campaign, journalists Fabrice Arfi and Karl Laske have now offered numerous testimonies and documents to better understand the contradictory relations between France and Libya and the destruction of the latter country. Mediapart has published Avec les compliments du guide (Goraintziak por el guía), with almost 400 pages, with about 400 pages.

Mediaparte has hung an interview on the network with the main witness, which was precisely published in video. From the hand of Lebanese French Ziad Takieddine, one can say that a character from John Le Carré speaks. “One day Abdallah Senoussi, who was head of Kadafi’s foreign services, calls me home and proposes to take some of the money to the head of the cabinet of the French Interior Minister, Claude Guéant. But how am I going to do that to get into France? We will inform the Minister of the Interior and you will have no problems. Then he brought his brother a suitcase full of money, the first one I guess had 1.5 million euros, most 500 bills, some 200.”

The following day you will travel to Tripoli-Paris on the flight of the Afriqiyah company, which operates from Antwerp. At the airport, there is no problem with the suitcase passing through customs between the other passengers. From there, by car, to the Ministry of the Interior. Aiming at the portal directly to the head of the cabinet to deliver the large suitcase.

Takieddin took two more bags from Tripoli to Paris, totalling EUR 5 million. Six years later, after the death of Al Kadafi, the disintegration of his regime with the war and the disaster in Libya, Abdallah Senoussi, the bag envoy, confirmed them before the International Criminal Court, adding an important nuance: the money was not for any reparation of the secret services of both countries, but to directly assist Nicolas Sarkozy to the French Presidency.

If it had been for the testimony of Takieddin, all those who say that it is nothing more than an operation against Sarkozy would have easily dismissed it. After all, Takieddine is an agent who has already been involved in so many other cases of corruption, particularly in the arms trade. But Arfi and Laska have confirmed it with other testimonies and above all documents, until they have drawn a complete picture of the relations between Kadafi and Sarkozy.

It's not Sarkozy, it's France.

One of the documents referred to by journalists, which the judges have by the way, offers the measure of the scandal: Libya’s head of the secret services, Moussa Koussa, pointed out in her notes the decision to give 50 million to Sarkozy. Not all payments are documented, but some arrive to Paris by jumping through Saudi Arabia or Malaysia. These funds have subsequently appeared in the quoted Guéant or in the pockets of Dominique de Villepin, who was Prime Minister between 2005 and 2007, as shown by invoices from several purchases.

A lot of money, always on banknotes, and it had to be stored somewhere. “In 2007 – according to the journalists – Sarkozy’s campaign director Claude Guéant rented an armored box at a bank in Paris, and as a big box wanted, they gave him one so that the man could stand up.”

Between 2005 and 2007, France and Libya experienced a period of great friendship. In December 2007, Libyan leader made a pompous 6-day official visit to France, where he remained in hospital. Al Kadafi was agreed internationally to break his isolation as a pariah state, and he had enough money to pay expensive for that apparent love. Incidentally, Abdallah Senoussi also wanted to settle in the French courts a case for the attack on an aircraft in 1998, in which 170 people died. France had a lot to sell to Libya, technology or any material, such as weapons.

However, the war would soon arrive in 2011. There are many reasons for the revolt and war in Libya. But what did Sarkozy need to be so aggressive in Libya? The truth is that a war always comes well for a lehendakari who wants to maintain power, and the elections were in 2012. But, moreover, in those convulsive wars there is always a danger that sensitive documentation and evidence will be lost out of hiding places, or that it will come into the hands of someone who is not convenient, so it is better to take care of oneself.

But the book does not just blame Sarkozy, Guéant and others. They want to show that corruption is at the heart of the state. The most distinguished personalities in France have left the darkest parts of the Republic in the hands of non-trusted people like Takieddine. And then, when everything gets complicated, they abandon those who serve to do what the state cannot do: the holders of bags with money, the same for investing in tax havens as for paying hidden fees for the sale of arms.

“The lobby is an industrial military also in France,” the journalists say. “We wanted to show that the same behaviors and the same protagonists have been playing at least since the time of Balladur [in Mitterrand’s second presidency, 1993-1995] to Sarkozy.”

The reader may reasonably ask how, if this is the case, the information has reached the general public, even if it is late. Is it because the military-industrial lobby has decided that it is high time Sarkozy was kicked off after being squeezed out?

Because when it comes to keeping secrets, there's very little pity in these real powers. Choukri Ghanem, former oil minister Libyan, the author of the first receipts of money for Sarkozy, who passed on to the rebels in 2011, drowned in Vienna on the Danube River in 2012.