He decided to do it, worried about the health of his advice, and, despite everything, disappointed.
Thursday March 11, Jérôme Lavrilleux, one of the main defendants in the so-called Bygmalion case, filed a request for postponement of the trial.
"It's a blow of the club, I haven't slept for three days", confided to the Parisian the former deputy director of the campaign of Nicolas Sarkozy in 2012, explaining that his lawyers, Mes Christian Saint-Palais and Laure Moureu, were both sick with Covid-19.
Since then, we learned, the lawyers of the thirteen other defendants, including the former President of the Republic Nicolas Sarkozy, informed the court that they were in favor of this request.
"Unanimously", we have been confirmed.
“This is a legitimate reason for postponement,” explains one of them.
Christian Saint-Palais is hospitalized.
He has been defending Jérôme Lavrilleux since the start of the case, in 2014. However, the latter, who occupies a central position in this case, must be able to be defended.
"
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The prosecution, resolved to this postponement, has already proposed three alternative sessions to wedge the five weeks of hearing between mid-May and the end of June.
"Considering the dates so quickly found in a judicial agenda yet very busy, the public prosecutor insists that the prosecutor who signed the indictment, and who was to request at the hearing, has not yet been transferred to Nanterre like that is planned ”, slips the lawyer of another defendant.
Anyway, the trial opens this Wednesday, at 1:30 p.m., in front of the 11th correctional chamber of the judicial tribunal of Paris.
Jérôme Lavrilleux's request for referral will be argued by Me Jean-Yves Leborgne, each party consulted, and the judges will decide.
The fourteen defendants in this case should all be present, including Nicolas Sarkozy, back in this place, two weeks after his sentence of three years in prison, two of which were suspended, in the "eavesdropping" affair.
Seven years after its revelation in the press, return to this Bygmalion affair which shook the right.
What is the Bygmalion affair?
Launched by an article in Le
Point
, then by the revelations of
Liberation
in May 2014, the case took the name of the company created by two close to Jean-François Copé, then secretary general of the UMP (which became Les Républicains in 2015 ).
A subsidiary of Bygmalion, Event & Cie was the main service provider for the organization of Nicolas Sarkozy's campaign meetings in 2012. At the end of May on BFMTV, Jérôme Lavrilleux, both right-hand man of Jean-François Copé and deputy director of the campaign , "Admits" that a false invoicing arrangement has been set up within the UMP to absorb "the explosion" of expenses.
And thus conceal the exceeding of the legal ceiling of the candidate's accounts.
At the end of three years of investigation, the prosecution confirms the existence of a system of expenditure breakdown between the UMP and the Association for financing the campaign of Nicolas Sarkozy (AFCNS-2012).
It would have been established around March 20, after the giant meeting in Villepinte, while the candidate decides "to accelerate the pace of the campaign by increasing the number of meetings and public meetings".
Made up of "a series of fraudulent transactions", including false invoices for agreements, this fraud linked to Event & Cie makes it possible to subtract some 16.2 million euros in expenses.
Added to this is fraud "by omission of invoices" from the UMP amounting to at least 3.5 million euros.
In total, nearly 20 million euros have "disappeared" from the campaign account submitted to the control bodies.
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The investigation rules out the hypothesis of embezzlement or of a "war chest" constituted for the benefit of Jean-François Cope.
Forced to resign, the latter saw his political career shattered.
What do we blame the former head of state?
Nicolas Sarkozy is dismissed for "illegal financing of the electoral campaign", an offense punishable by one year in prison and a fine of 3,750 euros.
The prosecution believes that "
(he)
undoubtedly benefited from the frauds revealed by the investigation, which allowed him to have during the 2012 campaign resources much greater than what the law allowed".
However, the investigation “did not establish that he had ordered
(these frauds)
, nor that he had participated in them, nor even that he had been informed”, specifies Judge Tournaire in his order for reference.
He is therefore accused of having let the expenses of his campaign slip away, without taking into account two alerts from chartered accountants, "for an amount of at least 42.8 million euros", that is to say well beyond legal ceilings (16.8 million euros for the 1st round, 22.5 million euros for the 2nd).
"It is the candidate and his small team who made the choice to focus the campaign on spectacular and expensive meetings and to entrust the organization to specialized agencies", writes the judge.
On the side of Nicolas Sarkozy, it is argued that the former president is on trial for "a formal offense, covered by the electoral code".
We refute the idea of a “runaway” in the number of meetings (44, “as many as in 2007”).
It is also suggested that "the campaign cost double, but not double".
Way, as Nicolas Sarkozy did during the investigation, to distill suspicion (on Bygmalion and the adversary, Cope).
"Where did this money go?"
I affirm that it did not pass in my campaign, had he advanced.
Who are the other defendants?
The thirteen other defendants are the managers of Bygmalion and Event & Cie (Bastien Millot, Guy Alvès, Sébastien Borivent and Franck Attal), the director of the presidential campaign (Guillaume Lambert) and the deputy director in charge of meetings (Jérôme Lavrilleux ), former executives of the UMP (Eric Cesari, Fabienne Liadzé, Pierre Chassat), the heads of the funding association AFCNS-2012 (Philippe Briand and Philippe Blanchetier) and two chartered accountants (Pierre Godet and Marc Leblanc ).
They are dismissed for "forgery and use of forgery", "breach of trust" or "concealment of this offense", "swindle" or "complicity", and "complicity in illegal campaign financing".
The penalties incurred range from three to five years in prison and a fine of up to 375,000 euros.
