PARIS – A Paris court on Monday found former French President Nicolas Sarkozy guilty of corruption and influence peddling and sentenced him to one year in prison and two years in prison.
The 66-year-old politician, who was president from 2007 to 2012, was convicted of illegally trying to obtain information from a senior magistrate in 2014 about a lawsuit he was involved in.
The court said Sarkozy would have the right to ask to be detained at home with an electronic bracelet.
Sarkozy will face another trial later this month along with 13 others on charges of illegal funding for his 2012 presidential campaign.
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Sarkozy, who was president from 2007 to 2012, vehemently denied all charges against him during the 10-day trial at the end of last year.
The trial marked the first time in modern French history that a former president went on trial for corruption. Sarkozy’s predecessor, Jacques Chirac, was found guilty in 2011 for misusing public money and received a two-year suspended prison sentence for actions during his time as mayor of Paris.
Sarkozy’s co-defendants – his lawyer and longtime friend Thierry Herzog, 65, and now retired magistrate Gilbert Azibert, 74 – also deny wrongdoing.
Prosecutors asked for two years in prison and a two-year suspended sentence for all three defendants for what they said was a “corruption pact”.
“There was never a pact,” Sarkozy told the court. “Not in my head, not in reality.”
“I want to be cleared of this infamy,” he added.
The trial focused on telephone conversations that took place in February 2014.
At the time, investigative judges had opened an investigation into the financing of the 2007 presidential campaign. During the investigation, they incidentally discovered that Sarkozy and Herzog were communicating via secret cell phones registered under the pseudonym “Paul Bismuth”.
Conversations tapped on these phones led prosecutors to suspect that Sarkozy and Herzog promised Azibert a job in Monaco in exchange for leaking information about another legal case, known by the name of France’s wealthiest woman, L’Oreal’s heiress Liliane Bettencourt.
In one of these calls with Herzog, Sarkozy said of Azibert: “I will make you go up … I will help you”.
In another, Herzog reminded Sarkozy of “saying a word” by Azibert during a trip to Monaco.
The lawsuits against Sarkozy were closed in the Bettencourt case. Azibert never got a job in Monaco.
Prosecutors concluded, however, that the “clearly stated promise” is in itself a crime of corruption under French law, even if the promise has not been kept.
Sarkozy vigorously denies any malicious intent.
He told the court that his political life was all about “giving (people) a little help. Just that, a little help. “
“I was 160 billion kilometers away from thinking that we were doing something that we had no right to do,” he said.
Sarkozy said he did not obtain confidential information from Azibert.
Prosecutors believe that Sarkozy was informed at some point that the secret phones were being tapped and that this is the reason why he did not help Azibert get the job.
The confidentiality of communications between a lawyer and his client was one of the main points of contention in the trial.
“You have in front of you a man whose more than 3,700 private conversations have been tapped … What did I do to deserve this?” Sarkozy said.
Sarkozy’s defense lawyer, Jacqueline Laffont, argued that the whole case was based on a “small talk” between a lawyer and his client.
“You don’t have the start of a piece of evidence, nor a witness’s report of the negligence, the declaration of the negligence,” she told the court.
Sarkozy withdrew from active politics after not being chosen as his conservative party’s presidential candidate for the 2017 French elections, won by Emmanuel Macron.
He remains very popular with right-wing voters, however, and plays an important role behind the scenes, including through maintaining a relationship with Macron, whom he is said to advise on certain topics. His memoirs published this summer, “The Time of Storms”, have been a best seller for weeks.