2023-04-25 22:12:27
former french president Nicolas Sarkozy has received a new complaint for corruption linked to the attribution to Qatar of the 2022 soccer World Cup, already investigated by the French Justice.
The Anticor anti-corruption association has filed this complaint, which is also directed against Sarkozy’s right-hand man, former minister Claude Guéant, against a publicist, who is at the origin of the current revelations, and against former Prime Minister of Qatar Hamad ben Jassem al-Thani.
The basis of this procedure are the statements of publicist François de La Brosse, who worked for free on Sarkozy’s 2007 election campaign and in his early years at the Élysée. After leaving power, his advertising company ran into financial problems and he turned to Sarkozy to help him overcome them.
The then French president, through Guéant, put him in touch with Qatari companies that, according to the NGO that signed the complaint, they owed him favors, after Sarkozy’s intervention so that the Persian Gulf country could organize the world.
La Brosse has told the newspaper Le Monde that he was in contact with the Qatari company Q.Media, with which He did sign a pre-contract but only after he threatened Sarkozy to expose his unpaid work, which could affect the candidate’s campaign accounts. The publicist has assured that, at the last moment, the president abandoned him.
This new complaint adds to the investigation opened by the National Financial Prosecutor’s Office in 2019 regarding the attribution of the World Cup to Qatar and, in particular, the intervention of Sarkozy.
In the eye of Justice is the lunch organized in November 2010 at the Elysée by the president together with the head of UEFA, Michel Platini, and the then crown prince and current emir of Qatar, Tamim Al Thani.
Investigators suspect that Sarkozy’s pro-Qatar intervention changed the influencer’s mind Platinum, which led to a shift in the vote in UEFA, which initially pointed to the United States, to attribute the competition to Qatar.
Therefore, the Prosecutor’s Office investigates possible crimes of “corruption” and “laundering”.
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