Shukri Ghanem never imagined that a small page from his notebook would go down in history. But he doesn't imagine anything these days: He was found on April 29, 2012, in Vienna, floating more dead than alive in the cold waters of the Danube. The former Libyan oil minister officially died of a heart attack, but US intelligence services – and they weren't the only ones – deemed his death "highly suspicious." Ghanem, who was also Muammar Gaddafi's prime minister from 2003 to 2006, took to jotting down the highlights of his day in his notebook. He wrote on the page for April 29, 2007, that two other high-ranking Libyan dignitaries had told him they had sent several million euros to Nicolas Sarkozy.

This is a serious stumbling block for the defense of the former French president, on trial for suspicions that Libya financed his 2007 presidential campaign. He maintains that the handful of people close to Gaddafi who have accused him since 2011 of having paid for his campaign were simply seeking revenge for the war that toppled the regime in October of that year. But if the first accusations in Ghanem's notebook date back to 2007, that argument collapses.

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