New reports have claimed that Nicolas Sarkozy has had his phone tapped for the past year on the orders of judges investigating alleged campaign donations from Libya.
French newspaper Le Monde says the phone taps have revealed evidence of tampering with the justice system.
It says a senior prosecutor in the country’s highest court was feeding Nicolas Sarkozy confidential information.
Nicolas Sarkozy’s lawyer denies the claims and says the phone taps were illegal.
The investigators who ordered the taps were looking into allegations, unproven, that Nicolas Sarkozy had taken illegal payments for his election campaign from late Libyan ruler Muammar Gaddafi.
According to Le Monde, what the investigators discovered from the phone taps was that Nicolas Sarkozy was getting inside information from the courts about the course of various inquiries into his past.
This information was allegedly being fed from a senior prosecutor at the appeals court whom, Le Monde says, Nicolas Sarkozy tried to reward with an official post in Monaco.
Nicolas Sarkozy’s lawyer, Thierry Herzog, said on Friday that his client “is probably still being tapped” and denounced what he said was a politically motivated plot against him.
He told AFP news agency: “There was no attempt to pervert the course of justice and in due course this monstrous violation will be shown to have been a political affair.”
Nicolas Sarkozy is planning a political comeback, and the drip of allegations like this has the potential to do him harm.
It was in 2011 that Col. Muammar Gaddafi’s son, Saif al-Islam, accused Nicolas Sarkozy of taking millions of his father’s money for illegal campaign funding, a claim Sarkozy has strongly denied.
At the time France was spearheading NATO’s military campaign in Libya.
NicolasSarkozy, who lost the 2012 presidential election to Francois Hollande, is also under formal investigation over claims he received illegal donations for the 2007 race from France’s richest woman, 90-year-old L’Oreal heiress Liliane Bettencourt. He has denied all the allegations.
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