May 6, 2007: Nicolas Sarkozy defeats Segolene Royal in the 2007 French Presidential election. According to French investigative news website Mediapart, Sarkozy's campaign was partially funded by a 50 million Euro payment from the regime of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, which was laundered through banks in Panama and Switzerland.
July 24, 2007: Five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor are released by the Gaddafi regime after being jailed for 8 years in Libya. The release is thanks to French diplomatic intervention.
July 25, 2007: President Sarkozy travels to Tripoli, Libya. According to French magazine Les Inrockuptibles, Sarkozy secured the release of the foreign medics the previous day by signing a secret nuclear accord with Libya on top of a public accord to provide Libya with a nuclear-powered desalination plant.
December 10, 2007: Libyan leader Gaddafi arrives in Paris for a five-day visit with President Sarkozy. Gaddafi notoriously pitches a Bedouin-style tent in the gardens of the former Paris mansion of Baron Gustave de Rothschild. Gaddafi signed $15 billion worth of business contracts while in Paris, which included the purchase of French-made conventional armaments.
March 19, 2011: French aircraft are the first to enter Libyan airspace as NATO declares war on the Gaddafi regime.
March 26, 2011: In the opening stages of the Libya-NATO War, Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, the son of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, publicly reveals that Libya funded Nicolas Sarkozy's 2007 Presidential campaign and that the Libyan regime has the financial documents to prove so.
September 1, 2011: French newspaper Liberation publishes a report that the anti-Gaddafi rebel force known as the Libyan National Transitional Council (NTC) promises to reserve a third of Libyan crude oil output for French companies in return for French support of the anti-Gaddafi uprising.
September 4, 2011: In the midst of the Libya-NATO War, files are found in Tripoli showing the deep connections between the Libyan national intelligence agency under the Gaddafi regime (led by Moussa Koussa), the U.S.'s Central Intelligence Agency and the United Kingdom's MI6 intelligence agency. The files show that the CIA had transported several prisoners to Libya in order to tortured under the "extraordinary rendition" program.
October 20, 2011: Muammar Gaddafi is killed in the Sirte District of Libya by rebel forces.
April 22, 2012: Sarkozy loses the first round of voting in the 2012 French Presidential election to Socialist Party candidate Francois Hollande.
April 29, 2012: Shukri Ghanem, Libya's Oil Minister at the beginning of the Libya-NATO War, is found floating dead in the Danube River in Vienna, Austria. Police have no indication it was a suicide.
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