EX FRENCH PRESIDENT SARKOZY SENTENCED
Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy has been sentenced to a year in prison for illegally funding his unsuccessful 2012 re-election campaign.
The 66-year-old was found guilty in a Paris court of spending tens of millions of euros more on his campaign than was permitted under the law.
He will not be jailed, however, and can serve his sentence at home with an electronic bracelet, the court ruled.
Sarkozy has denied any wrongdoing and is expected to appeal the ruling.
It is his second one-year prison term. In March, he became the first former president of France to receive a custodial sentence – for corruption and influence-peddling – but remains free pending an appeal of that sentence.
France’s Sarkozy likely to avoid jail despite new conviction
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In the latest trial, Mr Sarkozy was accused with 13 other defendants over their role in the so-called “Bygmalion” scandal.
Prosecutors said the former president’s UMP party splurged nearly double the €22.5m (£19.4m) cap on lavish campaign rallies and events, then tried to hide the costs by hiring a PR firm called Bygmalion to invoice the party, not the campaign.
On Thursday, the court in Paris ruled that though the former president may not have known the full details of the fraud, he must have seen that limits were breached and did nothing about it.
It is the latest legal challenge for Sarkozy, who served a five-year term as president from 2007.
In 2012, he lost his re-election bid to socialist François Hollande. Since then he has been targeted by several criminal investigations.
Earlier this year he was given a suspended prison sentence for trying to bribe a judge in 2014.
The crimes were specified as influence-peddling and violation of professional secrecy.
It is 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.
If Sarkozy’s appeal is unsuccessful, he could serve a year at home with an electronic tag, rather than go to prison.
His wife, supermodel and singer Carla Bruni, reacted by describing the case as “senseless persecution”, adding that “the fight continued, and truth would come out”. Sarkozy chills.