Nicolas Sarkozy was convicted Thursday in Paris of illegal financing of his campaign in 2012, in the Bygmalion affair. The former President of the French Republic was sentenced to one year in prison. This sentence is therefore greater than the requisitions of the prosecution which had proposed a year including 6 months suspended.
After the judgment, Nicolas Sarkozy’s lawyer let it be known that his client was going to appeal his conviction. “President Sarkozy, with whom I just spoke on the phone, asked me to appeal, which I will do immediately“, declared his lawyer Thierry Herzog at the exit of the courtroom of the court of Paris.
Electronic surveillance
Nicolas Sarkozy, who was not present this Thursday at the Paris Criminal Court, “continued to organize meetings“, after having been “warned in writing of the risk of being exceeded“of the legal ceiling, said the president of the court Caroline Viguier, when reading the judgment against the former president and the 13 people who appeared alongside him, all also found guilty of complicity in the illegal financing of election campaign.
In addition, Nicolas Sarkozy’s sentence, like those of the other defendants, will be “developed and carried out under electronic surveillance“.
The co-convicts of the former head of state were sentenced to terms of 2 to 3.5 years in prison, part of which was suspended. But unlike the latter – former executives of the campaign and the UMP, which has since become LR, as well as the Bygmalion company which organized the meetings – Nicolas Sarkozy is not blamed for the double billing system imagined to hide the explosion in authorized campaign spending.
In the end, the cost of the campaign was, according to the prosecution, at least 42.8 million, nearly double the legal ceiling at the time.
This is the second conviction in a few months for the former tenant of the Elysee Palace. Last March, he was sentenced to three years in prison, one of which was firm, for corruption and influence peddling in the so-called wiretapping affair. Nicolas Sarkozy had also appealed against this judgment.
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