Nicolas Sarkozy, former president of France, sentenced to 5 years in prison for criminal conspiracy

Paris – A Paris Court sentenced former French president Nicolas Sarkozy five years in prison after finding him guilty of criminal conspiracy in an alleged scheme to finance his 2007 campaign with Libya funds. In a surprise decision, the court ruled that Sarkozy will be imprisoned even if he appeals, but also said that the date of the sentence will come later, saving the humiliation of 70 years of being taken from the room of the wives.

The court found Sarkozy guilty of the criminal association at a plot from 2005 to 2007 to finance his campaign with Libya funds, in exchange for diplomatic favors. He clarified three other positions, including passive corruption, the illegal financing of the campaign and the concealment of the embezzlement of public funds.

Sarkozy denounced the ruling and said he would appeal.

“This injustice is a scandal,” he said.

“I ask the French, whether they voted for me or not, whether they support me or not, to understand what just happened. Hate really does not know limits,” said the former president, and added that if he ends after bars, he will do it, “with my high head.”

The court also found two of Sarkozy’s closest associates when he was president, former government ministers Claude Guyant and Brice Hortefeux, guilty of the criminal association, also incorporated them into other positions.

In general, the ruling suggested that the court believed that men had conspired to find Libyan funds for the Sarkozy campaign in 2007, but that the judges were not convinced that the conservative leader himself was directly involved in the financing effort, or that any Libyan money ended up being used in his winning campaign.

The main judge, in a long -term reading hours of the long verdict, said that Sarkozy had allowed his nearby associates to reach the Libyan authorities, “to obtain or try to obtain financial support in Libya with the purpose of obtaining the financing of the campaign.”

The court said he could not determine with certainty that any Libyan money ended up financing the Sarkozy campaign.

Sarkozy stood up when the judge read the verdict. He was accompanied by his wife, singer and model Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, in the courtroom, which was also full of reporters and members of the public. Sarkozy sat in the front row of the defendant’s section, and his three adult children were also in the room.

Sarkozy, who was chosen in 2007 but lost a re -election offer in 2012, denied everything good for a three -month trial earlier this year, which involved 11 coacked, including three former ministers.

Despite multiple legal scandals that have cloudy their presidential legacy, Sarkozy remains a Influential figure in the French right -wing politics and in entertainment circles, by virtue of his marriage to Bruni-Sarkozy.

The roots of a scandal

The accusations against him date back to 2011, when a Libyan news agency and the former dictatorial leader of the country Muammar Gaddafi He said that the Libyan State had secretly channeled millions of euros in Sarkozy’s electoral campaign in 2007.

In 2012, French research mediapart published what he said was a memorandum of Libyan intelligence that referred to a financing agreement of 50 million euros. Sarkozy denounced the document as a falsification and demanded by defamation. The court said Thursday that “now it seems more likely that this document is a falsification.”

The researchers also sought a series of trips to Libya made by people close to Sarkozy when he served as Interior Minister of France, 2005 and 2007, including his chief of cabinet.

In 2016, the Franco-Lebanon businessman Ziad Takieddine told Mediapart that he had delivered luggage full of cash from Tripoli to the French Interior Ministry under Sarkozy. He later retracted his statement. That investment is now the focus of a separate investigation into the possible handling of witnesses.

Both Sarkozy and his wife have been preliminary accused of participation in alleged efforts to press Takieddine. That case has not yet gone to trial.

Takieddine, who was one of the coacked in the case of Sarkozy, died Tuesday in Beirut at the age of 75. He fled to Lebanon in 2020 and did not attend the trial.

The prosecutors alleged that Sarkozy had benefited knowing what they described as a “corruption pact” with the Qadafi government.

Libya’s lifelong dictator was shot down and killed in a lifting in 2011, ending his four decades in the country in North Africa.

The trial shed light on the conversations of Canal de France with Libya in the 2000s, when Qadafi sought to restore diplomatic ties with the West. Before that, Libya was considered a state of Paria.

Sarkozy has dismissed accusations as politically motivated and depends on counterfeit evidence. During the trial, he denounced a “plot” that said it was staged by “liars and criminals”, including the “Qadafi clan”.

He suggested that the accusations of illegal campaign financing were retaliation for his call as president of France for the elimination of Qadafi. Sarkozy was one of the first Western leaders in promoting military intervention in Libya in 2011, when the prinemocratic protests of Arab spring swept the Arab world.

“What credibility can be given to such statements marked by the Revenge Seal?” Sarkozy asked in comments during the trial.

In June, Sarkozy was stripped of his Honor Legion Medal, the highest civil prize in France, after his sentence in a separate case.

Previously, he was declared guilty of corruption and influence to try to bribe a magistrate in 2014 in exchange for information on a legal case in which he was involved.

Sarkozy was sentenced to use an electronic monitoring bracelet for a year. He was granted a conditional release in May due to his age, which allowed him to eliminate the electronic label after he used it for just over three months.

In another case, Sarkozy was sentenced last year by Illegal campaign financing in its failed re -election offer of 2012. He was accused of having spent almost twice the maximum legal amount and was sentenced to one year in prison, of which six months were suspended.

Sarkozy has denied accusations. He has appealed that verdict to the highest Court of Cassation in France, and that appeal is pending

• Corruption
• Muammar Gaddafi
• Libya
• France
• Crime