France’s Sarkozy prepares for five-year prison term after guilty verdict

Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy leaves after the verdict in his trial for illegal campaign financing from Libya for his successful 2007 presidential bid, at the Tribunal de Paris courthouse in Paris. Photo / Julien De Rosa, AFP

A court has sentenced former French President Nicolas Sarkozy to five years in prison over a scheme for the late Libyan dictator Moamer Kadhafi to fund his 2007 presidential run, a verdict that will make the right-winger the first French postwar leader to serve jail time.

The Paris criminal court convicted Sarkozy, 70, who was President from 2007-2012, on charges of criminal conspiracy, although it acquitted him of corruption and personally accepting illegal campaign financing.

The court ordered that Sarkozy should be placed in custody at a later date, with prosecutors to inform the former head of state on October 13 when he should go to prison.

He was also fined €100,000 ($202,000) and banned from holding public office. He has been convicted already in two separate trials but always avoided jail, in one case serving his graft sentence with an electronic tag, which has since been removed.

Sarkozy, who was present in court for the verdict accompanied by his model and musician wife Carla Bruni-Sarkozy as well as his three sons, looked ashen-faced and shaken after the verdict.

But he vowed to appeal.

The verdict was “extremely serious for the rule of law”, he told reporters after leaving the courtroom, adding that he would “sleep in prison with my head held high”.

“This injustice is a scandal,” he said. After her husband finished addressing reporters, Bruni-Sarkozy, in a sign of the family’s anger, snatched away the microphone muffler of the Mediapart news website which had published the first revelations on the case.

Sarkozy’s filing of an appeal has no effect on his obligation to go to prison. He is to be the first French leader to be incarcerated since Philippe Petain, the Nazi collaborationist head of state of France’s Vichy regime, who was jailed after World War II.

‘Exceptional gravity’

Prosecutors argued that Sarkozy and his aides devised a pact with Kadhafi in 2005 to illegally fund his victorious presidential election bid two years later.

Investigators believe that in return, Kadhafi was promised help to restore his international image after Tripoli was blamed by the West for bombing a plane in 1988 over Lockerbie, Scotland, and another over Niger in 1989, killing hundreds of passengers.

The presiding judge, Nathalie Gavarino, said the offences were of “exceptional gravity” and “likely to undermine the confidence of citizens”.

The court’s ruling, however, did not follow the conclusion of prosecutors that Sarkozy was the alleged beneficiary of the illegal campaign financing.

He was acquitted on separate charges of embezzlement of Libyan public funds, passive corruption and illicit financing of an electoral campaign.

Another defendant in the trial, Alexandre Djouhri, who is accused of being the intermediary in the scheme, was sentenced to six years and ordered to be placed immediately under arrest.

Sarkozy’s right-hand man, Claude Gueant, and ex-minister Brice Hortefeux were ordered to serve six and two years respectively.

Hortefeux, 67, will be able to serve his term with an electronic tag, while Gueant, 80, will not go to prison because of his health.

Eric Woerth, Sarkozy’s 2007 campaign treasurer, was acquitted.

Accuser’s death

The judgment came two days after the death on Tuesday in Beirut of Franco-Lebanese businessman Ziad Takieddine, a key accuser of Sarkozy in the case.

Takieddine, 75, had claimed several times that he helped deliver up to five million euros ($10.1m) in cash from Kadhafi 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 both Sarkozy and Bruni-Sarkozy, on suspicion of pressuring a witness.

Sarkozy has faced repercussions beyond the courtroom, including losing his Legion of Honour – France’s highest distinction – following the graft conviction.

But he still enjoys considerable influence and popularity on the right of French politics, and has on occasion had private meetings with President Emmanuel Macron.

Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau, who leads Sarkozy’s right-wing Republicans party, expressed “his full support and friendship”, adding he had “no doubt” the ex-president will “devote all his energy” to defending himself on appeal.

- Agence France-Presse