Fixer who tried to broker deal between Qatar and Qaddafi arrested in London
A businessman wanted over his alleged role in Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi’s financing of Nicolas Sarkozy’s 2007 election campaign faces extradition after his arrest in London.
A hearing to approve the removal of French-Algerian Alexandre Djouhri to France under a European arrest warrant is expected within days. The businessman was held at Heathrow Airport on Sunday and remanded in custody.
“The warrant was issued by French authorities for offences of fraud and money laundering,” a spokesman for London police said.
Recent weeks have been a rapid descent for Mr Djouhri, 58, who once tried to broker a pact between Qatar and Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi to end the 2011 uprising.
Despite refusing to answer a summons from French magistrates investigating Mr Sarkozy’s campaign, Mr Djouhri was yesterday reported to have dined with president Emmanuel Macron in Algiers last month.
The Swiss resident has been a focus of the inquiry, which was opened in 2013 by judges investigating claims by Qaddafi that the Libyans provided funds for Mr Sarkozy’s election effort.
The inquiry triggered further investigations into Mr Djouhri’s affairs, with the financial prosecutors investigating a €10 million (Dh43.7m) gain from a suspect property sale.
The property was sold to the Libyan African sovereign investment fund controlled by the Qaddafi regime. Bashir Saleh, its former manager fled France to South Africa days after Mr Sarkozy lost his re-election bid in 2012.
In secretly recorded conversations, Mr Djouhri promised to send judges a letter in which Mr Saleh would deny any Libyan financing of the campaign.
Ziad Takieddine, a Lebanese businessman, claims that the pair arranged for €50m to be handed over to Mr Sarkozy and his chief of staff, Claude Gueant in 2007.
Mr Djouhri’s Parisian lawyer did not respond to requests for comment from the French press.
Mr Sarkozy has dismissed the allegations as the claims of vindictive Libyan regime members furious over his participation in the US-led military intervention that ended Qaddafi’s 41-year rule.
Mr Djouhri is also suspected
of helping Mr Saleh to leave France in 2012 on a private jet headed for Niger. He eventually set up home in South Africa and has been sought since.
Known as a “grand fixer” for the French elite in North Africa, Mr Djouhri first came to attention as an intermediary for the French environmental services group Vivendi Environnement.
Now known as Veolia, the group often employed Mr Djouhri as it sought deals involving water systems, rubbish collection and oil.
But it was his role as attempted peace maker between Qaddafi and the rebels that were trying to break the regime’s grip on Tripoli and other strongholds in 2011 that brought him to wider attention.
Working with Dominique de Villepin, the former French prime minister, Mr Djouhri tried to secure a power-sharing plan to stop the civil war.
The initiative would have involved some of Qaddafi’s children and henchmen working with rebels after the leader fled into exile.
Mr de Villepin confirmed at the time that the pair mediated the talks on the Tunisian island of Djerba and tried to involve the UN in brokering a pact.
Not only were Qatari officials in the background as sponsor of some of the rebel factions, but Mr de Villepin also sought a role for Venezuelan diplomats as Qaddafi trusted their assurances of exile under Hugo Chavez.
But any prospects of deal quickly fell apart after the key Libyan interlocutor Omar Abukurah, who had been appointed oil minister by Qaddafi, defected to Tunisia. The assurances on offer in the initiative could not secure support from enough members of the Libyan opposition.
The links between “Monsieur Alexandre” and the French right dated to the time of Jacques Chirac. He was instrumental in brokering the agreement to free Bulgarian nurses held in Tripoli, in which Mr Sarkozy’s first wife, Cecilia, flew to the Libyan capital to meet Qaddafi.
When the centrist Mr Macron visited Algiers last month, Mr Djouhri was on the guest list at a dinner hosted by the French ambassador.
Weeks later, however, the Algerian authorities made it known he was no longer welcome. After a brief stint in Geneva, he flew to London were the French warrant was enforced by police.
Born to an Algerian family in the northern Parisian suburb of Saint Denis, Mr Djouhri assembled his formidable contact book from nothing.
“I see in Djouhri a prince of darkness,” said Pierre Pean, his biographer.
“He presents himself as a businessman, others have described him as intermediary, which he does not like. He left the suburbs and now lives at the top of the state with less than 300 people.”
When Mr Macron visited Algiers last month, Mr Djouhri was on the guest list at a dinner hosted by the French ambassador