He, the former boss of the communication agency whose name baptized the affair, would like "to put an end to the fantasy of personal enrichment of the leaders of Bygmalion". During his questioning in front of the 11th chamber of the Paris court on Friday, Bastien Millot, 48, brushes aside one by one the rumors that have targeted him since the revelation of the scandal on the financing of the Sarkozy campaign of 2012, two years after. That of "a romantic relationship with Jérôme Lavrilleux" - the former head of meetings at the UMP, whose televisual confessions on the existence of a fraudulent system to conceal the explosion of expenses had marked the beginning of the 'investigation. That of "a plot" and "a war chest" to serve the interests of the former UMP leader Jean-François Copé - with whom, we understand,it is no longer bound at all.
"It would have been professional suicide"
Bastien Millot speaks of his reconversion as a lawyer in Marseille as having “saved” him, of friendships broken by “the cluster bomb” Bygmalion and of “enormous anger.
"He lets go, pell-mell, this type of question:" I would like to understand why we turned to Bygmalion
(Editor's note: to organize the meetings)
when there were other providers ", asks. he.
“Who and how did we choose to place the responsibility for this system on Bygmalion, given the specific nature of our links with Jean-François Copé?
He continues.
“I have always thought that Bygmalion had been a convenient tree to hide a much darker forest,” he suggests.
One wondered how the former "boss" and co-founder of Bygmalion, the only one of the four ex-leaders to have denied any knowledge of the fraud system, could, after the court heard the damning statements of the first three, persist in challenging .
For an hour and a half, in a somewhat disconcerted room, we had a flood of denials and digressions.
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The other three designated him as having given the green light to the solicitation of the UMP in mid-March 2012 because of "a problem of ceilings"? Guy Alvès, the co-founder, talks to him about it in his office and they conclude that they have "no other choice but to accept the illegality"? Sébastien Borivent informed him beforehand? No, says Bastien Millot, it was never a question of a "ventilation proposal or false invoices or so on". “For me that would have been professional suicide,” he says. "I am asked that the UMP be the recipient of the invoices for Nicolas Sarkozy's campaign
(Editor's note: instead of the funding association),
he asserts.
I have no problem with that since a party can cover the expenses of a campaign.
And how does he explain these statements that do not go in his direction?
“This is not what I experienced,” he replies.
Right in his boots, Bastien Millot, not only denies any offense of complicity in forgery and use of forgery, fraud and campaign financing, but he places himself, in the words of the president of the tribunal, squarely "outside" field ”.
"It's as if things were done without your knowledge!"
»She will end by exclaiming.
Relations "clashed" with Nicolas Sarkozy
To begin with, the ex-president of Bygmalion discards all real authority over the other three, and in particular over the subsidiary Event & Cie, where Franck Attal, the organizer of campaign meetings, operated: “Events, since 2009, was placed under the authority of Guy Alvès. There were two of us to decide, ”he slips. To continue, he places himself at a distance from any link with the campaign itself, by retracing at length the history of his “clashed” relations with Nicolas Sarkozy - which he had never done during the investigation. "I became someone who was in the camp of (his) enemies," he says. So in 2012, when the market for meetings was offered to his company, he immediately warned the other three: “I don't want to deal directly or indirectly with Nicolas Sarkozy's campaign. "
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On the screen of the courtroom appears an email dated April 24, 2012 - "one of the few to have been found" concerning him, recalls the president, who asks, without obtaining an answer, "why this mail when we found nothing else?
The sender is Bastien Millot, the addressees Sébastien Borivent, Franck Attal, with Guy Alvès in copy.
"URGENT and IMPORTANT - estimate and invoicing Event & Cie", says the object.
"In order to have a precise visibility of the services carried out within the framework of the presidential campaign and to ensure the greatest rigor in our accounting procedures, I thank you for kindly sending me a file including ..."
Quotes duly signed by the campaign treasurer for past and future services, summary table of operations, list Bastien Millot. “It's a cover email,” Guy Alvès thought at the time. “It is above all to remind the two (recipients) that, in the interests of the company, to guard against any litigation with a client, it is important to have documents. It is a clarification ”, answers learnedly Bastien Millot in court, unshakable.