A court in Paris has delivered a guilty verdict against former French President Nicolas Sarkozy, convicting him of criminal conspiracy in the case concerning the financing of his electoral campaign by the regime of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. This information was reported by Reuters.
The ex-president was sentenced to five years in prison with a suspended execution of the sentence. As Le Monde clarifies, this means Sarkozy will not be immediately arrested, and within a month he will be summoned to the prosecutor's office, where he will be informed of the start date for serving his sentence. Additionally, the court ordered the politician to pay a fine of 100,000 euros.
According to the investigation materials, in 2005, Nicolas Sarkozy and his associates agreed to cooperate with Muammar Gaddafi, and between 2006 and 2007, they received at least 50 million euros from the Libyan leadership. According to the prosecution, the then French Minister of the Interior used these funds to finance his presidential campaign, violating the ban on the use of foreign money. In return, Paris provided support to Gaddafi's regime, which was at the time internationally isolated.
On the remaining charges—including embezzlement of public funds, passive corruption, and violations of campaign financing rules—the ex-president was acquitted. The prosecution had previously sought a seven-year prison sentence for him. Throughout the proceedings, Sarkozy denied all the charges against him.
Nicolas Sarkozy served as President of France from 2007 to 2012. As the BBC notes, this trial is already his third.
In 2021, he was sentenced to one year in prison and two years probation in a case involving corruption and influence peddling; the prison term was later replaced with house arrest. In another trial in September 2021, Sarkozy was also found guilty and received a suspended sentence.