The Franco-Lebanese businessman Ziad Takieddine was heard Thursday in Beirut by French magistrates who made the trip, as part of the case of the supposed Libyan financing of Nicolas Sarkozy's presidential campaign in 2007, a source said. judicial.
Read also: Libyan funding: Ziad Takieddine claims to have been "manipulated" by the judges
Ziad Takieddine, who has multiplied the reversals since the start of this affair in 2012, had questioned the former French head of state before turning around in November.
Also targeted by an arrest warrant issued by the French justice for another case, Ziad Takieddine has been living in Lebanon since this summer.
For several hours Thursday morning in Beirut, he was heard by two examining magistrates and a French financial prosecutor, said a Lebanese judicial source.
The hearing, in a room of the Court of Cassation, took place in the presence of a lawyer for Mr. Takieddine and a Lebanese prosecutor who supervised the session, said this source.
“
It started this morning.
It's going well,
”confirmed Ziad Takieddine's French lawyer, Élise Arfi, who was unable to travel to Beirut.
Following his about-face clearing Nicolas Sarkozy on November 11, Ziad Takieddine was summoned for a hearing on November 25 in Paris before the examining magistrates, but he did not appear.
In December, he accused various investigating magistrates of having incited him to question the former French president, declarations qualified as "
fabrications
" by the judges.
To read also: Takieddine and Sarkozy: justice and the media must question their prejudices
Nicolas Sarkozy and the former minister Claude Guéant, already prosecuted for several years in this affair, as well as another former minister, Brice Hortefeux, were recently indicted for a new criminal qualification, "
criminal association
".
The investigation was opened after the publication by Mediapart in 2012, between the two presidential rounds, of a document supposed to prove that the campaign of Nicolas Sarkozy had been financed by the regime of Muammar Gadhafi.
Ziad Takieddine, 70, fled to Beirut after being sentenced in June in France to five years in prison in the context of the Karachi case on occult commissions linked to arms contracts with Riyadh and Pakistan, part of which helped finance Édouard Balladur's unsuccessful presidential campaign in 1995.