France’s highest court has upheld former President Nicolas Sarkozy’s conviction for illegal campaign financing, cementing a damaging chapter in the political legacy of the onetime conservative leader. The Court of Cassation’s ruling on Wednesday makes final a one-year prison sentence, half of it suspended, handed down for massive overspending during Sarkozy’s failed 2012 reelection campaign, according to AP.
Under French law, the former president, now 70, can serve the remaining portion of the sentence at home with electronic monitoring. The court emphasized that it was not reexamining the facts of the case, but confirming that legal procedures had been properly followed. A Paris court first convicted him in 2021, and an appeals court upheld the decision earlier this year, finding that Sarkozy’s campaign spent nearly twice the legal limit of €22.5 million.
The ruling comes just weeks after Sarkozy was released from Paris’ La Santé prison while appealing a separate conviction involving alleged Libyan financing of his victorious 2007 presidential run. He had served 20 days before judges authorized his release pending the appeals process. Sarkozy continues to deny wrongdoing in all cases.
Those legal proceedings are far from over. His appeal trial in the Libya affair is scheduled from March to June. Last September, a Paris court convicted him of criminal association for allegedly participating in a scheme to channel money from Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya into his 2007 campaign in exchange for diplomatic favors. He received a five-year sentence, though he was acquitted of several other charges, including corruption.
Investigators say two of Sarkozy’s closest aides met secretly in 2005 with Abdullah al-Senoussi, Gaddafi’s brother-in-law and intelligence chief, notorious for masterminding deadly airline bombings in the late 1980s.
Complicating matters further, Sarkozy and his wife, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, face separate preliminary charges related to alleged witness tampering involving Ziad Takieddine, the businessman who once accused Sarkozy of receiving Libyan cash before retracting his statements. Magistrates will decide whether the couple will face trial; Takieddine died last September in Beirut.
Sarkozy, who has already been definitively convicted in a corruption case involving attempts to bribe a judge, is set to publish a memoir on December 10 titled Diary of a Prisoner, describing his time behind bars as “a nightmare.”
