Sarkozy found guilty, gets year in detention
The former French president is convicted of corruption. He may be allowed to serve his sentence at home.
PARIS — A Paris court on Monday found former President Nicolas Sarkozy guilty of corruption and influence-peddling and sentenced him to a year in prison and a two-year suspended sentence.
The 66-year-old politician, who was France’s president from 2007 to 2012, was convicted for having tried to illegally obtain information from a senior magistrate in 2014 about a legal action in which he was involved.
The court said Sarkozy would be entitled to request to be detained at home with an electronic bracelet.
This is the first time in France’s modern history that a former president has been convicted and sentenced to prison for corruption.
Sarkozy’s co-defendants — his lawyer and longtime friend Thierry Herzog, 65, and now-retired magistrate Gilbert Azibert, 74 — were also found guilty and given the same sentence as the former president.
Based on “consistent and serious evidence,” the court found that Sarkozy and his co-defendants sealed a
“pact of corruption.” It said the facts were “particularly serious” given that they were committed by a former president who used his status to help a magistrate who had served his personal interest.
In addition, as a lawyer by training, Sarkozy was “perfectly informed” about committing an illegal action, the court said.
Sarkozy had firmly denied all the allegations against him during the 10day trial, which took place at the end of last year.
The trial focused on phone conversations that took place in February 2014.
At the time, investigative judges had launched an inquiry into the financing of the 2007 presidential campaign. During the investigation, they incidentally discovered that Sarkozy and Herzog were communicating via secret cellphones registered to the alias Paul Bismuth.
Conversations wiretapped on these phones led prosecutors to suspect Sarkozy and Herzog of promising Azibert a job in Monaco in exchange for leaking information about another legal case, known by the name of France’s richest woman, L’Oreal heiress Liliane Bettencourt.
In one of these phone calls with Herzog, Sarkozy said of Azibert: “I’ll make him move up .... I’ll help him.”
In another, Herzog reminded Sarkozy to “say a word” for Azibert during a
trip to Monaco.
Legal proceedings against Sarkozy have been dropped in the Bettencourt case. Azibert never got the Monaco job.
Prosecutors have concluded, however, that the “clearly stated promise” constitutes in itself a corruption offense under French law, even if the promise wasn’t fulfilled.
Sarkozy vigorously denies any malicious intent. He told the court that his political life was all about “giving [people] a little help. That’s all it is — a little help.”
“I was 100 billion miles away from thinking we were doing something we did not have the right to do,” he said.
Sarkozy said he did not receive confidential information from Azibert.
Prosecutors believe that
Sarkozy was at some point informed the secret phones were being wiretapped and that it is the reason he did not ultimately help Azibert get the job.
The confidentiality of communications between a lawyer and his client was a major point of contention in the trial.
“You have in front of you a man of whom more that 3,700 private conversations have been wiretapped .... What did I do to deserve that?” Sarkozy said.
Sarkozy’s defense lawyer, Jacqueline Laffont, argued that the entire case was based on “small talk” between a lawyer and his client. “You don’t have the beginning of a piece of evidence, not the slightest witness account, the slightest declaration,” she told the court.
The court concluded that the use of wiretapped conversations was legal as long as they helped show evidence of corruption-related offenses.
Sarkozy withdrew from active politics after failing to be chosen as his conservative party’s presidential candidate for France’s 2017 election, which was won by Emmanuel Macron.
Sarkozy remains very popular with right-wing voters and plays a major role behind the scenes, including through maintaining a relationship with Macron, whom he is said to advise on certain topics. His memoirs published in the summer, “The Time of Storms,” was a bestseller for weeks.
He will face another trial this month along with 13 other people on charges of illegally
financing his 2012 presidential campaign.
His conservative party is suspected of having spent about $51 million, almost twice the maximum authorized, to finance the campaign, which ended in victory for his Socialist rival, Francois Hollande.
In another investigation opened in 2013, Sarkozy is accused of having accepted millions from Libyan dictator Moammar Kadafi to illegally finance his 2007 campaign.
He was slapped with preliminary charges of passive corruption, illegal campaign financing, concealment of stolen assets from Libya and criminal association. He has denied wrongdoing.