Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy has begun serving a five-year prison sentence in Paris after being convicted of criminal conspiracy for allegedly accepting Libyan funds to finance his 2007 presidential campaign.Moments after Sarkozy entered jail, his lawyer Christophe Ingrain said a request for his release had been filed. "Nothing justifies his imprisonment, said Ingrain: "He’ll be inside for at least 3 weeks or a month."
Nicolas Sarkozy has become the first French ex-president to go to jail. Not since World War II Nazi collaborationist leader Phillipe Pétain was jailed for treason in 1945 has any French ex-leader gone behind bars.
Sarkozy has always denied doing anything wrong in a case involving allegations that his 2007 presidential campaign was funded by millions of euros from late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi.
The former center-right leader was cleared of personally receiving the money but convicted of criminal association with 2 close aides Brice Hortefeux and Claude Guéant, for their role in secret campaign financing from the Libyans.
The 2 men had both had talks with Gaddafi’s intelligence chief and brother-in-law in 2005, in a meeting arranged by a Franco-Lebanese intermediary called Ziad Tiakeddine, who died in Lebanon shortly before Sarkozy’s conviction.
Though he lodged an appeal, Sarkozy is still considered innocent but he has been told he must go to jail in view of the "exceptional seriousness of the facts."
Ever since he left office in 2012 Sarkozy has been dogged by criminal inquiries and for months had to wear an electronic tag around his ankle after a conviction last December for trying to bribe a magistrate for confidential information about a separate case. Late next month, France’s highest administrative court will give it’s verdict on Sarkozy’s appeal against a six-month jail term in another illegal campaign financing case known as the Bygmalion affair.
A 2020 trial in France dealt with allegations that Sarkozy bribed a judge with a retirement package in return for information on an investigation into alleged campaign finance violations due to payments he is said to have received from heiress Liliane Bettencourt.
Sarkozy, who was president from 2007-2012, has appealed against his jail term at La Santé prison, where he will occupy a small cell in the jail’s isolation wing. Sarkozy said he would take 2 books with him into prison, a life of Jesus by Jean-Christian Petitfils and the Count of Monte Christo, Alexandre Dumas’s classic story of a man who was wrongly imprisoned who escapes to wreak vengeance on his prosecutors.
