Lawyers for the plaintiffs roundly denounced the defendants' "implausibilities," "lies" and "contempt" for the court in their closing arguments on Monday, March 24, at the trial for suspected Libyan financing of Nicolas Sarkozy's 2007 presidential election campaign. They portrayed the defendants as having grouped together "in a clannish defense" around the former French president.

First, there were the families of the 1989 UTA Flight 772 bombing victims (which left 170 dead, including 54 French citizens), still horrified at the fact that, after the attack, Paris had undertaken a rapprochement with Muammar Gaddafi's Libya, which was behind the attack. "As far as the families were concerned," said Vincent Ollivier, one of their lawyers, "there was an organized group of six people who had devised a project to make Nicolas Sarkozy's childhood dream come true, in order to have access to secret revenue, and a group that saw no problem in absolving the man who had murdered their loved ones." In addition to Sarkozy, the rest of the group of six were: Claude Guéant, his closest associate at the Interior Ministry; Brice Hortefeux, his best friend, who was promoted to minister; his former friend, Thierry Gaubert; the two middle-men, Ziad Takieddine and Alexandre Djouhri; and the treasurer of Sarkozy's 2007 campaign, Eric Woerth.

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