A court on Thursday sentenced former French president Nicolas Sarkozy to five years in prison over a scheme for late Libyan dictator Moamer Kadhafi to fund his 2007 presidential run.
In a verdict that will make the rightwinger the first French postwar leader to serve jail time, the Paris criminal court convicted Sarkozy, 70, on criminal conspiracy charges.
However, it acquitted the former head of state, France’s president from 2007 to 2012, 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 him on October 13 when he should go to prison.
He was also fined 100,000 euros ($117,000) 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 and his lawyer Christophe Ingrain later confirmed one had been filed.
The verdict was “extremely serious for the rule of law”, Sarkozy 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 will have to serve his sentence while awaiting the outcome of his appeal.
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 Sarkozy and his aides, acting with his authority and in his name, struck a deal with Kadhafi in 2005 to illegally fund his victorious presidential election bid two years later.
The public prosecutor accused Sarkozy of entering into a “Faustian pact of corruption with one of the most unspeakable dictators of the last 30 years”.
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”.
The court’s ruling, however, did not follow the conclusion of prosecutors that Sarkozy was the 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, due to his health.
Hortefeux told BFMTV he was “angry” at the sentence.
Eric Woerth, Sarkozy’s 2007 campaign treasurer, was acquitted.
– Accuser’s death –
The judgment came two days after the death in Beirut of Franco-Lebanese businessman Ziad Takieddine, a key accuser in the case.
Takieddine, 75, had claimed several times he helped deliver up to five million euros ($6 million) 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 French right, 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.
(AFP)
