French-Lebanese key witness in Sarkozy-Gaddafi trial dies two days before verdict

Ziad Takieddine, the French-Lebanese businessman and key witness in former French President Nicolas Sarkozy's long-running campaign finance scandal, has died in Beirut at the age of 75, just two days before a Paris court was set to deliver its verdict.

Takieddine, who spent the last five years in Lebanon beyond the reach of French justice, had been at the centre of political and legal dramas that gripped France for nearly two decades. 

In a 2016 interview with French media outlet Mediapart, he claimed to have delivered up to five million euros ($6 million) in cash from the late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi to Sarkozy and his chief of staff in 2006 and 2007. 

He later retracted the statement, prompting allegations that Sarkozy and close allies had influenced him. Claims the former president and his wife, singer and model Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, have always denied. Both have since been charged in a separate investigation into alleged witness tampering.

Born in 1950 in Baakline, Lebanon, to a prosperous Druze family, Takieddine moved to France, where he began his career in advertising before investing in the ski resort Isola 2000 in the early 1980s. 

There he met his future wife and forged connections with French politicians, including François Léotard, laying the foundation for decades of discreet ties to the conservative right.

By the 1990s, Takieddine had reinvented himself as an intermediary in arms deals, brokering contracts for submarines and frigates with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. His dealings, often shrouded in secrecy, helped build both his fortune and his notoriety.

The public spotlight reached him in 2008 with the Karachi affair, a corruption scandal linked to a 1995 French arms deal, in which alleged kickbacks were used to finance political campaigns.

The scandal became infamous for a 2002 bombing in Pakistan that killed 11 French engineers, with some speculating the attack was tied to unpaid commissions.

His later involvement in Sarkozy's 2007 campaign and the Libyan financing case marked the final stage of his legal and personal life in France. 

In interviews, Takieddine was alternately combative, charming, and as some labelled him, including Sarkozy, "a great manipulator."

Court documents and seized archives confirmed his central role in a network linking French political figures to Libya.

Prosecutors allege that in 2005, Sarkozy and his aides agreed with Gaddafi to fund the 2007 presidential campaign illegally, exceeding the legal campaign financing limit.

Takieddine's claims played a key role in bringing the allegations to wider public attention.

Sarkozy, who was president from 2007 to 2012 and has been convicted in other cases, denies the charges.

After he became president, Sarkozy was one of the first to welcome Gaddafi with open arms, inviting the controversial leader to quite literally pitch his tent in the grounds of the guest residence near Paris's Élysée.

The friendship would prove short-lived after Sarkozy lent his support in 2011 to the rebel groups in Tripoli, calling for NATO to intervene and help dismantle the Gaddafi regime. 

Sarkozy faces a seven-year jail term if the verdict is against him on Thursday. 

Convicted in the Karachi affair and sentenced to five years in prison, a sentence later upheld on appeal, Takieddine fled to Lebanon in 2020, carrying with him a lifetime of secrets and contradictions about Gaddafi, Sarkozy, and the high-level meetings in Paris with North African and Middle Eastern leaders, where he often served as translator.