A Paris court on Thursday sentenced former president Nicolas Sarkozy to five years of prison for accepting illegal campaign funds from late Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi.
The sentence means that he will be imprisoned whether he launches an appeal or not. The judge also ordered that he pay a €100,000 fine.
Prosecutors alleged that Sarkozy, who has always denied the charges, made a deal with Gaddafi in 2005, when he was France’s interior minister, to obtain campaign financing in exchange for supporting the then-isolated Libyan government on the international stage.
The court found Sarkozy guilty of criminal association in a scheme from 2005 to 2007 to finance his campaign with funds from Libya in exchange for diplomatic favours. But it cleared him of three other charges – including passive corruption, illegal campaign financing and concealment of the embezzlement of public funds.
Sarkozy, accompanied by his wife, the singer and model Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, was present in the courtroom, which was also filled with reporters and members of the public. Sarkozy sat in the front row of the defendant’s seats. His three adult sons were also in the room.
The ruling is the latest in a string of legal hurdles for the right-wing ex-leader, 70, who denied the charges. Sarkozy, who was president of France from 2007 to 2012, has already been convicted in two separate cases and stripped of France’s highest honour.
The judgement has been overshadowed by the death on Tuesday in Beirut of Franco-Lebanese businessman Ziad Takieddine, a key accuser of Sarkozy in the case.
Takieddine had claimed several times that he helped deliver up to five million euros ($6 million) in cash from Gaddafi to Sarkozy and the former president’s chief of staff in 2006 and 2007.
He then spectacularly retracted his claims before contradicting his own retraction, prompting the opening of another case against Sarkozy and his wife on suspicion of pressuring a witness.
The death after cardiac arrest of Takieddine, 75, who had been living in Lebanon to escape a French arrest warrant, has added new uncertainty to the proceedings, raising the prospect of the judgement possibly being postponed. (France24)
