Judges grill Sarkozy in campaign finance probe

Ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy appears before French judges due to accusations about his 2007 election finances.

BORDEAUX: French judges grilled ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy on Thursday about accusations that his 2007 election campaign was financed with funds secured illegally from France's richest woman.

In a case that could wreck the 57-year-old's hopes of a political comeback, Sarkozy is suspected of taking financial advantage of elderly L'Oreal heiress Liliane Bettencourt when she was too frail to fully understand what she was doing.

Bettencourt is now 90 and has been in poor health since 2006.

Judicial sources have told AFP Sarkozy could be formally indicted on a charge of taking advantage of someone in a position of weakness, although the magistrate also has the option of interrogating him as a witness under caution.

Bettencourt's former accountant, Claire Thibout, told police that she had handed envelopes stuffed with cash to Bettencourt's right-hand man, Patrice de Maistre, on the understanding it was to be passed on to Sarkozy's campaign treasurer, Eric Woerth.

Maistre withdrew a total of four million euros ($5.2 million) in cash from Bettencourt's Swiss bank account in seven instalments between 2007 and 2009.

Kickback scandal

Sarkozy is also currently under investigation for alleged kickbacks on a Pakistani arms deal used to finance the right in 1995, when he was budget minister.

One of French ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy's allies was convicted Thursday of making threats to a lawyer for the families of 11 French engineers killed in a 2002 bombing in Karachi at the centre of the Pakistani kickback scandal.

Former minister Brice Hortefeux was ordered to pay a 5,000 euro ($6,400) fine for telling a newspaper the lawyer "should be smashed up".