Sarkozy together with the then Qatari heir. Photo: Getty.
Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy received a new complaint for corruption linked to the attribution to Qatar of the 2022 World Cup, already investigated by the French Justice.
The anti-corruption association Anticor filed this complaint, which is also directed against Sarkozy’s right-hand man, former minister Claude Guéant, against a publicist, who is at the origin of the current revelations, and against former Prime Minister of Qatar Hamad ben Jassem al-Thani.
The The basis of this procedure are the statements of publicist François de La Brosse, who worked for free on Sarkozy’s election campaign in 2007 and in his early years at the Élysée.
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After stepping down from power, his advertising company ran into financial problems and turned to Sarkozy to help you overcome them.
The then French president, through Guéant, put him in contact with Qatari companies that, according to the NGO that signed the complaint, they owed him favorsbehind the intervention Sarkozy’s so that the country of the Persian Gulf could organize the World Cup.
La Brosse told the newspaper Le Monde that he was in contact with the Qatari company Q.Mediawith which came to sign a pre-contract but only after he threatened Sarkozy to expose his unpaid work, potentially affecting the candidate’s campaign accounts.
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The publicist assured that, at the last moment, the president abandoned him.
This new complaint adds to the investigation opened by the National Financial Prosecutor’s Office in 2019 regarding the allocation of the World Cup to Qatar and, in particular, the Sarkozy intervention.
In the eye of Justice is the lunch organized in November 2010 at the Elysée by the president together with the head of UEFA, Michel Platini, and the then crown prince and current emir of Qatar, Tamim Al Thani.
Investigators suspect that Sarkozy’s intervention in favor of Qatar changed the opinion of the influential Platiniwhich led to a shift in the vote in UEFA, which initially pointed to the United States, to attribute the competition to Qatar.
Thus, the Prosecutor’s Office investigates possible crimes of “corruption” and “laundering”.
