The Prosecutor’s Office Frenchman reproached, when beginning this Monday his complaint against Nicolas Sarkozy and the other nine defendants who share the bench with the former French president, a scandal that questioned the cleanliness of the elections and damaged the “social pact” in which the democracy.
Prosecutor Rodolphe Juy-Birmann affirmed that the holding of free elections is “a central pillar of democratic society” and denounced that this case, in which the alleged financing with money from the Libyan regime of Muammar Gaddafi of the electoral campaign that allowed Sarkozy to access the Elysee in 2007 is being judged, “broadly participated in the deterioration of that social pact.”
Juy-Birmann insisted that breaking the rules in an election cannot be justified and spoke of “a strange feeling of discomfort” for the elements that emerge in this summary.
Another of the prosecutors at the Paris Court of Appeal, Damien Brunet, later referred to what he called “preparatory acts” of the crime of association of criminals for which the former head of the French State between 2007 and 2012 is accused. He alluded to the meetings held with dignitaries of the Gaddafi regime by his two most direct collaborators, Brice Hortefeux and Claude Guéant, before the meeting in October 2005 that Sarkozy himself, then Minister of the Interior, held in Tripoli with the Libyan leader.
“Corruption pact” with Gaddafi
According to the indictment, Sarkozy, Hortefeux and Guéant established a “corruption pact” with Gaddafi to receive funds from him that would feed his 2007 presidential campaign.
Sarkozy, now 71 years old, was sentenced last year in the first instance to five years in prison for association of criminals and in that trial the Public Ministry had requested seven years against him.
The Prosecutor’s Office will announce its request for sentences on Wednesday, to later give way to the defense of the accused. The trial will be heard on the 27th for sentencing, which is expected in November.
Last week, the former president who in 2025 already spent 20 days behind bars for his conviction in the first instance had to face attacks from civil parties, the relatives of the victims of an attack on a French commercial plane that exploded while flying over Niger on September 19, 1989, and which caused the death of its 170 occupants.
These relatives criticized him for trying to present himself as a victim based on the conclusions of the sentence in the first trial, in which it was established that Sarkozy allowed Guéant and Hortefeux to meet in Tripoli with the number two of the Gaddafi regime. Abdallah Senoussi.
Because Senoussi, brother-in-law of the Libyan leader, was sentenced in absentia to life sentence in France for that terrorist attack, in which 54 of the dead were French.
