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20-12-2024
PARIS: France’s highest court has upheld a corruption conviction against former President Nicolas Sarkozy, brushing aside his appeal.
Wednesday’s ruling by the Cour de Cassation means that Sarkozy who was in power from 2007 to 2012 must now wear an electronic monitoring bracelet for a year.
Sarkozy, 69, reacted by saying he was not prepared to accept “the profound injustice” and would now turn to the European Court of Human Rights to challenge the verdict.
He was originally sentenced to three years in jail in 2021, but two of those years were suspended and the third converted to electronic monitoring instead of prison.
Sarkozy was convicted of trying to bribe a judge in 2014, after he had left office, by suggesting he could secure a prestigious job for him in return for information about a separate case.
In the 2021 ruling, Judge Christine Mee said the conservative politician “knew what [he] was doing was wrong”, adding that his actions and those of his lawyer had given the public “a very bad image of justice”.
The crimes were specified as influence-peddling and violation of professional secrecy.
Speaking after Wednesday’s verdict by the Cour de Cassation, Sarkozy’s lawyer, Patrice Spinosi, said his client would comply with the conviction terms.
Sarkozy has now exhausted all his legal options in France, and his planned appeal to the European Court of Human Rights will not delay the verdict from being carried out.
The 2021 conviction was a legal landmark for post-war France.
The only precedent was the trial of Sarkozy’s predecessor Jacques Chirac, who got a two-year suspended sentence in 2011 for having arranged bogus jobs at Paris city hall for allies when he was Paris mayor. Chirac died in 2019.
Nicolas Sarkozy is the first ex-president in post-war France to have been given a custodial sentence for corruption.
He and two former associates were each sentenced to three years in jail two of them suspended – on 1 March, for influence-peddling and violation of professional secrecy.
Sarkozy, 66, had tried to bribe a magistrate in return for information on an investigation into his campaign finances, the judge ruled. He denies wrongdoing and is expected to appeal.
That magistrate Gilbert Azibert and lawyer Thierry Herzog were the two sentenced alongside him. Police had recorded secret phone calls where Sarkozy was reportedly heard telling Herzog: “I’ll get him promoted, I’ll help him.”
Sarkozy’s wife singer and ex-supermodel Carla Bruni denounced the sentence as “a senseless witch-hunt”. Sarkozy can serve the one-year custodial term at home with an electronic tag.
Sarkozy, a conservative former interior minister, has been beset by corruption investigations since his 2007-2012 presidency in France.
He was due to go on trial in May in a separate case relating to the so-called Bygmalion affair. He is accused of having fraudulently overspent in his 2012 presidential campaign, which he lost to Socialist rival François Hollande.
Sarkozy is also accused of having received illegal funds from the late Libyan dictator Col Muammar Gaddafi for his 2007 presidential campaign. The charges are: membership in a criminal conspiracy, corruption and illegal campaign financing and benefiting from embezzled public funds.
Losing to Hollande in 2012 made him the first French president not to be re-elected for a second term since Valéry Giscard d’Estaing in 1981. (Int’l Monitoring Desk)
