Summaries of seven recorded telephone conversations between the former French president Nicolas Sarkozy and his lawyer Thierry Herzog have added to suspicions that the two men corrupted a senior judge and went to extraordinary lengths to thwart magistrates investigating the financing of Mr Sarkozy's 2007 presidential campaign.
The two men even rehearsed a fake telephone conversation, subsequently repeated on a line they knew to be tapped, in Mr Sarkozy’s words, “so that one gives the impression of having a conversation” to the judges who were listening.
Le Monde newspaper had revealed that Mr Sarkozy and Mr Herzog were under surveillance on March 7th.
That led to a second scandal last week, when the socialist justice minister lied about when she learned of the wire taps.
But the precision of the summaries published by the investigative website Mediapart has swung condemnation back towards the Sarkozy camp, especially after Mr Herzog was quoted mocking due process of law and calling the Bordeaux judges who investigated Mr Sarkozy for abusing the weakness of a billionaire contributor “bastards”. (That case was dropped for insufficient evidence.)
Tapped
The phone conversations took place between January 28th and February 11th of this year. Someone had tipped Mr Sarkozy off that his mobile phone was tapped, so he purchased a second mobile, under the false name Paul Bismuth.
He and Mr Herzog were outfoxed by police: their replacement phones were also tapped.
In the first conversation, Mr Herzog informs Mr Sarkozy that Gilbert Azibert, the senior appeal court judge – and their informer – at the Cour de Cassation, France's highest court, has obtained the rapporteur's memo regarding Mr Sarkozy's appeal to have datebooks seized in the Bettencourt case disqualified as evidence.
'Our friend'
The following day, Judge Azibert, who Mr Sarkozy calls "our friend", reports that he has lunched with the senior prosecutor, who is secretly in favour of Mr Sarkozy's quest to have the datebooks disqualified. Mr Herzog comments that the court of appeal should follow the senior prosecutor's advice "unless the law ends up winning".
Mr Herzog later says Judge Azibert has met with two other councillors at the Cour de Cassation. The court ruled against Mr Sarkozy on March 11th.
On January 30th, Mr Herzog tells Mr Sarkozy that if the court rules in his favour, all references to the datebooks will have to be excised from the records of the Bettencourt case. “That is going to make some work for those bastards from Bordeaux,” Mr Herzog says.
Mr Herzog’s promise to “call my correspondent this morning . . . because they are obliged to go via him” in relation to a possible search of Mr Sarkozy’s office led investigators to believe Mr Sarkozy has another highly placed mole in the justice system.
