Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy sentenced 5 years in prison in the event of corruption

A Paris court sentenced former French president Nicolas Sarkozy on Thursday to five years in prison on Thursday after having found him guilty of a key accusation in his trial for financing illegal campaigns presumed by the government of the then chief of the then, Moammar Gaddafi.

The historic decision made Sarkozy the first former president of modern France condemned to real time behind bars. In a big surprise, the court judged that the 70 -year -old will be incarcerated despite his intention to appeal.

He indicated that the date of his imprisonment would be decided later, experiencing the conservative chief the humiliation of being taken from the crowded courtroom in the handcuffs.

The court declared Sarkozy guilty of a criminal association in a plot from 2005 to 2007 to finance his winning campaign with Libya funds in exchange for diplomatic favors. This has erased him from three other accusations, including passive corruption, illegal campaign funding and the concealment of the embezzlement of public funds.

“If they absolutely want me to sleep in prison, I will sleep in prison. But my head high,” said Sarkozy after the verdicts were given. “I am innocent. This injustice is a scandal.

“I ask the French people – whether they have voted for me or not, whether they support me or not – to understand what has just happened. The hatred does not really know any limits,” said Sarkozy with his wife, singer and model Carla Bruni -Sarkozy, by his side. He was also supported in court by his three adult sons.

Questions remain on Libyan funds

The court also concluded two of Sarkozy’s closest partners when he was president – former ministers Claude Guéant and Brice Hortefeux – culminated criminal association but also paid them other accusations.

Overall, the decision suggested that the court thought that the men had conspired to request Libyan funding 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 all Libyan money ended up being used in his winning campaign.

The chief judge, in a reading of a long verdict, said that Sarkozy allowed his relatives to contact the Libyan authorities “to obtain or try to obtain financial support in Libya in order to obtain campaign funding”.

But the court also declared that he could not determine with certainty that the Libyan money ended up funding the Sarkozy campaign.

However, under French law, a corrupt regime can always be a crime even if money was not paid or cannot be proven, the court said.

The accusations retrace their roots in 2011 when a Libyan news agency and Gaddafi itself said that the Libyan state had secretly channeled millions of euros in the Sarkozy campaign in 2007.

In 2012, the Outlet French Investigation Mediatart published what he said he was a memo of Libyan intelligence referring to a financing agreement of 50 million euros (81 million CDN dollars). Sarkozy denounced the document as a counterfeit and continued for defamation. The court ruled on Thursday that it “now seems very likely that this document is a counterfeit”.

The co-defender in a separate probe died this week

Investigators also examined a series of trips to Libya made by people close to Sarkozy when he was Minister of the Interior in 2005 and 2007, including his chief of staff.

In 2016, the French Lebanese businessman Ziad Takieddine told Mediatart that he had delivered suitcases filled with tripoli silver at the French Ministry of the Interior under Sarkozy. He then retracted his declaration.

This reversal is now at the center of a separate investigation into the falsification of possible witnesses. Sarkozy and his wife received preliminary charges for involvement in alleged efforts to put pressure on Takieddine. This case has not yet been tried.

Takieddine, who was one of the co-accused, died on Tuesday in Beirut. He was 75 years old. He had fled to Lebanon in 2020 and did not attend the trial.

Gaddafi, the longtime dictator of Libya, was overthrown and killed in an uprising in 2011, ending his rule of four decades. The trial highlighted France’s talks with Libya in the 2000s, when Gaddafi sought to restore diplomatic links with the West. Before that, Libya was considered a pariah state.

Sarkozy rejected allegations as a political motivation and dependent on falsified evidence. During the trial, he denounced a “conspiracy” which, according to him, had been staged by “liars and crooks”, including the “Gaddafi clan”.

He suggested that the allegations of illegal campaign funding were reprisals, given that he was one of the first Western leaders to put pressure for a military intervention in Libya in 2011, when pro-democracy demonstrations in the Arab spring swept the Arab world.

“What credibility can be given to such declarations marked by the seal of revenge?” Sarkozy asked in the comments during the trial.

In June, Sarkozy was stripped of his medal in the Legion of Honor – the highest prize in France – after his conviction in a separate case.

Earlier, he was found guilty of corruption and influence of peddling for trying to bring a magistrate in 2014 in exchange for information on a legal case in which he was involved.

In another case, Sarkozy was sentenced last year of funding for illegal campaign in his candidacy for re -election of 2012. He was accused of having spent almost double the maximum legal amount and was sentenced to one year in prison, six months of which were suspended.

Sarkozy denied these allegations and called on this verdict.