And that’s not all. Pierre-Stéphane Fort insists: even without having sold the Rafales, President Nicolas Sarkozy would still have achieved a great deal. In 2010, his favorite club, Paris-Saint-Germain, is going badly. Close to relegation, his finances have been in the red for years. At the time, the club was owned by Colony Capital, an investment fund run by Sébastien Bazin… a close associate of Nicolas Sarkozy. A few months after the awarding of the World Cup to Qatar, QSI, the Qatari investment fund, bought Paris Saint-Germain.
So did Nicolas Sarkozy abuse his influence to push the Qatari candidacy to obtain, in exchange, help from Qatar to save PSG and his friend Sébastien Bazin? French investigators are working on this track.
In any case, PSG had been losing millions of euros for years when in 2011, a dramatic turn of events, Sébastien Bazin managed to sell the club to the Qataris almost three times its purchase price.
Nicolas Sarkozy denies having negotiated the vote of Michel Platini against the takeover of PSG at an advantageous price.
However, in the legal file, we find messages sent by Sébastien Bazin to a relative about the famous lunch at the Elysée. He explains that he had President Sarkozy on the telephone and that he transmitted to him “key messages“. The next day, Sébastien Bazin sends back an SMS:
Nicolas Sarkozy called me back. Tamim confirms that the deal will be done after December 2.
December 2 is precisely the day of the vote on the awarding of the World Cup to Qatar.