Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s house and offices raided on Tuesday as part of a judicial probe into financial relations between his political camp and L’Oreal heiress Liliane Bettencourt, the country’s richest woman.
Ever since he was out of the presidency on May 6, it was Sarkozy’s first legal tangle. During his tenure he enjoyed presidential immunity from legal pursuit. That cover expired in mid-June.
Sarkozy’s lawyer, Thierry Herzog, said the raids a day after his client had left for Canada on holiday would show nothing and that he had already supplied information to investigators that debunked suspicions of secret meetings with Bettencourt, Reuters reported.
“These raids … will as expected prove futile,” Herzog said in a statement.
Herzog said magistrates looking into whether Sarkozy had received campaign funds from the now mentally fragile Bettencourt had been supplied with diary details of all Sarkozy appointments in 2007.
Those details, he said, “prove that the purported ‘secret meetings’ with Madame Liliane Bettencourt were impossible”.
Francois Hollande, who unseated Sarkozy in May, has vowed to change the rules in France under his tenure so that the law no longer treats presidents differently from other civilians regarding matters that predate their time in office.
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