Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy has been handed a five-year jail sentence.
The former President of the Republic was found guilty of criminal conspiracy and sentenced today by the Paris Judicial Court. He was sentenced to five years in prison with a fine of €100,000. The 70-year-old is expected to appeal the guilty verdict, but will still have to go to jail, loca media reports.
Le Monde reported that, as part of the sentence, he will be “summoned within one month by the prosecutor’s office to be informed of his incarceration date” - but his appeal won’t suspend the sentence. Sarkozy was found guilty on one charge but acquitted of others in a trial over the illegal financing of his 2007 presidential campaign with money from the government of then-Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi.
Sarkozy was found by the court to be guilty of criminal association in a scheme from 2005 to 2007 to finance his campaign with funds from Libya in exchange for diplomatic favours.
However the court cleared him of other charges including passive corruption, illegal campaign financing and concealment of the embezzlement of public funds.
The serious charge of criminal association can carry a jail sentence of up to 10 years, while prosecutors had argued for seven. Sarkozy was found guilty alongside two of his closest associates from his time in office, former ministers Claude Gueant and Brice Hortefeux. The pair were also found guilty of criminal association but likewise acquitted of some other charges.
The verdicts appeared to show the court believed the men conspired together to seek Libyan funding for Sarkozy’s 2007 campaign, but that judges were not convinced that the conservative leader himself was guilty of then putting the scheme in place.
Sarkozy stood in the courtroom, which was filled with reporters and members of the public, alongside his wife the singer and model Carla Bruni-Sarkozy. His three adult sons were also in the room.
Judge Nathalie Gavarino told the former president he was guilty of having "allowed his close associates to act with a view to obtaining financial support from the Libyan regime". Sarkozy is now the first former French president found guilty of accepting illegal foreign funds to win office.
Sarkozy denied all wrongdoing during his three-month trial which also saw 11 co-defendants, including three former ministers, in the dock. The accusations first started circling in 2011 when a Libyan news agency and Gadhafi himself said the Libyan state had secretly funnelled millions of euros into Sarkozy’s 2007 campaign.
Then a French investigative journalism organisation published what it claimed was a Libyan intelligence memo referencing a 50 million-euro funding agreement. Sarkozy said the document was forged and sued for defamation.
One of the co-defendants, Franco-Lebanese businessman Ziad Takieddine, told French journalists he had delivered suitcases filled with cash from Tripoli to the French Interior Ministry under Sarkozy. He later retracted his statement.
That reversal is now the focus of a separate investigation into possible witness tampering. Both Sarkozy and his wife were handed preliminary charges for involvement in alleged efforts to pressure Mr Takieddine. That case has not gone to trial yet.
Mr Takieddine, who was one of the co-defendants, died on Tuesday in Beirut, his lawyer Elise Arfi said. He was 75. He had fled to Lebanon in 2020 and did not attend the trial.
Sarkozy was tried on charges of passive corruption, illegal campaign financing, concealment of the embezzlement of public funds and criminal association. Prosecutors alleged that Sarkozy had knowingly benefited from what they described as a “corruption pact” with Gadhafi’s government.
Libya’s longtime dictator was toppled and killed in an uprising in 2011, ending his four-decade rule of the North African country. The trial shed light on France’s back-channel talks with Libya in the 2000s, when Gadhafi was seeking to restore diplomatic ties with the West. Before that, Libya was considered a pariah state.
Sarkozy has dismissed the allegations as politically motivated and reliant on forged evidence. During the trial, he denounced a “plot” he said was staged by “liars and crooks” including the “Gadhafi clan”.
He suggested that the allegations of campaign financing were retaliation for his call – as France’s president – for Gadhafi’s removal. Sarkozy was one of the first Western leaders to push for military intervention in Libya in 2011, when Arab Spring pro-democracy protests swept the Arab world.
“What credibility can be given to such statements marked by the seal of vengeance?” Sarkozy asked in comments during the trial. In June, Sarkozy was stripped of his Legion of Honour medal – France’s highest award – after his conviction in a separate case.
Earlier, he was found guilty of corruption and influence peddling for trying to bribe a magistrate in 2014 in exchange for information about a legal case in which he was implicated.
Sarkozy was sentenced to wear an electronic monitoring bracelet for one year. He was granted a conditional release in May because of his age, which allowed him to remove the electronic tag after he wore it for just over three months.
In another case, Sarkozy was convicted last year of illegal campaign financing in his failed 2012 re-election bid. He was accused of having spent almost twice the maximum legal amount and was sentenced to a year in prison, of which six months were suspended.
Sarkozy has denied the allegations. He has appealed against that verdict to the highest Court of Cassation, and that appeal is pending.