The former French president Nicolas Sarkozy will go on trial on Monday over the biggest political financing scandal in modern French history, in which he is alleged to have received millions of euros in illegal election campaign funding from the regime of the late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi.

The historic trial of the rightwing former French president and 12 other people – including three former government ministers – for criminal conspiracy to receive funds from a foreign dictator on a massive scale threatens to worsen voters’ already low trust in the French political class.

After a 10-year anti-corruption investigation, the court will hear allegations of what investigative magistrates called a “corruption pact” forged between Sarkozy and the Libyan regime in which intermediaries delivered suitcases full of cash to ministry buildings in Paris to illegally fund Sarkozy’s victorious 2007 presidential campaign.