TERESA SUAREZ/EPA
Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy sentenced to five years in prison for receiving funds from the regime of late Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.
With a book already prepared about his three-week experience in prison, the former French president has his conviction confirmed for illegal financing of the 2012 campaign. The sentence includes a six-month suspended sentence.
This Wednesday, Nicolas Sarkozy exhausted all appeals in the Bygmalion case and is left definitively sentenced to one year in prison for the illegal financing of the 2012 French presidential campaign, which he would lose to socialist François Hollande.
The sentence includes at least six months of suspended imprisonment, and it is expected that the actual time will be served with electronic braceletaccording to the newspaper.
At the center of the process, remember, is a double billing scheme set up around the communications and events company Bygmalion. The law set the campaign financing ceiling at 22.5 million euros, but Sarkozy’s campaign will have reached close to 43 million, with excess spending being invoiced by Bygmalion to the UMP party, instead of to the official presidential campaign account. In 2015, the UMP would change its name to The Republicans.
The appeal court has now rejected all arguments presented by the former President’s defense and confirmed the convictions not only of Sarkozy, but also of his campaign director, Guillaume Lambert, and two officials from the party that supported him, Eric Cesari and Pierre Chassat. Everyone is definitely doomed within the same process.
Sarkozy has always denied any illicit practices. The , which was in force while the appeal was being considered, has now fallen to the ground, and the former President will know in the coming weeks the date on which the sentence will begin.
This is already the second definitive conviction by Nicolas Sarkozy. In 2024, as part of the so-called Bismuth case, his guilt for corruption and influence peddling was confirmed, after being caught in wiretapping, using the false name Paul Bismuth, while trying to obtain privileged information about another judicial process in exchange for favors for a magistrate. The sentence was carried out using an electronic bracelet for several months.
The inclusion of the new conviction in the criminal record could weigh on the outcome of another ongoing case: the case of alleged Libyan financing of the 2007 presidential campaign, in which Sarkozy was, in the first instance, sentenced to five years in prison.
The former President still lives in La Santé, in Paris, an experience he recounts in a memoir to be published soon, Diary of a Prisoner.
