He mimes the scene at the same time as he speaks: “It's a suitcase like that. It opens like that. And the money is inside.” The man talking and miming is Ziad Takieddine, the Franco-Lebanese arms dealer and intermediary who first introduced Nicolas Sarkozy to Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi in 2005. For the first time, in a recorded interview with Mediapart and television news agency Premières Lignes, Takieddine has revealed how in late 2006 and early 2007 he personally handed three suitcases containing a total of 5 million euros from the Libyan regime to the then French interior minister Sarkozy and his chief of staff Claude Guéant.