Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy was found guilty on Thursday of criminal conspiracy following a trial in which he was accused of accepting millions of euros in illegal payments from the late Libyan ruler, Muammar Gaddafi, between 2005 and 2007.
The Paris Criminal Court sentenced him to five years in prison: it is the first time a former French president has received a prison sentence.
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Sarkozy, 70, was found not guilty of other charges, including illegal campaign financing and passive corruption.
Sarkozy has always denied all the charges. He claims the charges against him were politically motivated by Gaddafi’s inner circle in revenge for his backing of the antigovernment uprising in Libya in 2011.
Here is what we know.
Who is Nicolas Sarkozy?
Sarkozy is the right-wing, former president of France, who served from 2007 until 2012. In 2017, Sarkozy retired from active politics.
From 2004 to 2007, he was the leader of the liberal-conservative Republicans party, then called the Union for a Popular Movement (UMP). During that time, he was also minister of the interior in the government of Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin under President Jacques Chirac.
He won the 2007 presidential election with 53 percent of the vote, beating Segolene Royal of the Socialist Party (PS).
He married model and singer Carla Bruni in 2008 following a widely publicised courtship while he was president.
Since the end of his presidential term, Sarkozy has remained an influential figurehead for the political right in France. However, he has faced a litany of legal troubles, including several trials relating to various corruption charges and two convictions, and was stripped of France’s highest award, the Legion of Honour, this year.
What was Sarkozy accused of?
In his latest trial, which began in January this year, French prosecutors claimed that when he was interior minister, Sarkozy made a corrupt agreement to support Gaddafi’s government on the international stage in return for financing worth millions of euros to help pay for his presidential campaign.
The agreement was alleged to have been carried out via a network of Libyan spies, a convicted terrorist, arms dealers and millions of euros shipped to Paris in suitcases.
Overall, the charges he faced in his trial, which came after a 10-year anticorruption probe, were:
- Concealing the embezzlement of public funds.
- Passive corruption.
- Illegal campaign financing.
- Criminal conspiracy with a view to committing a crime.
Besides Sarkozy, there were 11 other defendants, including the late French-Lebanese businessman Ziad Takieddine; Claude Gueant, a former close aide of Sarkozy; Eric Woerth, Sarkozy’s former head of campaign financing; and Brice Hortefeux, a former minister.
Takieddine fled to Lebanon in June 2020 after a French court sentenced him to five years in jail in a separate corruption case. He died earlier this week, just two days before the verdict.
What has Sarkozy been found guilty of?
The Paris court found Sarkozy guilty of criminal conspiracy between 2005 and 2007, but acquitted him of the other charges. Sarkozy has presidential immunity against prosecution for actions after he became president in 2007.
The judge stated there was no evidence that Sarkozy struck a deal with Gaddafi or that funds sent from Libya ended up in Sarkozy’s campaign, even though the timing aligned and the money’s routes were “very opaque”.
However, she found Sarkozy guilty of criminal conspiracy for allowing close aides to contact Libyan individuals in an attempt to secure campaign financing.
How did the evidence against Sarkozy come out?
The allegations first came to light in 2011 when a Libyan news agency reported that the Gaddafi government had provided financing to Sarkozy’s 2007 election campaign.
In 2014, news channel France 24 reported that Gaddafi had said, “Sarkozy is mentally deficient … It’s thanks to me that he became president … We gave him the funds that allowed him to win,” during a recorded interview with another French broadcaster, France 3 TV.
Al Jazeera was not able to verify these claims.
The same year, Gaddafi’s son, Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, told Euronews that Gaddafi’s government had provided campaign funding to Sarkozy. He said: “The first thing we ask of this clown is that he return the money to the Libyan people, but he let us down.”
In 2012, Mediapart, a French online news outlet, published a note reportedly from the Libyan secret services from December 2006. The note allegedly mentioned Gaddafi’s agreement to provide Sarkozy with 50 million euros ($52m at current exchange rates) for campaign financing. Sarkozy claimed the document was fake.
In 2016, French-Lebanese businessman Ziad Takieddine, a co-defendant accused of acting as a “middle man” but who has since died, told Mediapart that he had delivered 5 million euros ($5.2m) in cash from Libya to Sarkozy and his former chief of staff. However, Takieddine retracted this statement in 2020, the year he fled to Lebanon.
What was Sarkozy’s relationship with Gaddafi?
In 2007, Sarkozy welcomed Gaddafi to the Elysee Palace in Paris. But when pro-democracy protests erupted during the Arab Spring in 2011, Sarkozy was among the first Western leaders to advocate for military intervention in Libya.
Gaddafi was killed by opposition forces supported by NATO in 2011, ending his four-decade rule.
How has Sarkozy reacted to this week’s verdict?
On Thursday, Sarkozy claimed again that he is innocent and will appeal the five-year prison sentence, which could take immediate effect.
The judge stated that Sarkozy will have only a brief period to settle his affairs before prosecutors require him to report to prison, which will likely be within a month.
“If they absolutely want me to sleep in jail, I will sleep in jail, but with my head held high,” Sarkozy said to reporters after the ruling was announced.
What else has Sarkozy been accused of?
In October 2023, French prosecutors charged Sarkozy with witness tampering in relation to this case. His wife, the model and singer Carla Bruni, was charged with hiding evidence related to the same case the following year.
Sarkozy has also been convicted in two other legal cases.
In December last year, the highest court in France, the Court of Cassation, upheld a 2021 conviction against Sarkozy for bribery and “influence peddling”. He was sentenced to one year of house arrest and was ordered to wear an electronic bracelet over that period. This has since been removed. Sarkozy has said he would bring this case to the European Court of Human Rights. This case was revealed through a wiretapped phone call during the Libya financing investigation.
