French Prosecutors Are Requesting For The Former President Nicolas Sarkozy To Serve 7 Years In Prison Plus A Big Fine

In response to claims that former Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi’s government unlawfully funded former President Nicolas Sarkozy’s 2007 campaign, French prosecutors on Thursday, March 27, asked for a seven-year prison term and a fine of 300,000 euros, or about $325,000.

A five-year ban on Sarkozy’s civic, civil, and family rights was also demanded by the National Financial Prosecutor’s Office, or PNF as it is known in French. This ban would prevent him from holding elected office or working in any public judicial capacity.

The case, which began in January and is scheduled to wrap up on April 10, is regarded as the most significant of the several legal controversies that have tarnished Sarkozy’s reputation since leaving office.

The 70-year-old Sarkozy, who served as France’s leader from 2007 to 2012, is accused with criminal association, passive corruption, unlawful campaign funding, and concealing misappropriation of public funds. Any wrongdoing has been disputed by him.

The charges date back to 2011, when Gadhafi and a Libyan news agency claimed that the Libyan government had covertly contributed millions of euros to Sarkozy’s 2007 campaign.

The French investigative group Mediapart claimed to have a Libyan intelligence paper mentioning a funding deal of 50 million euros in 2012. Sarkozy filed a defamation lawsuit after calling the paper a fake.

Despite the lack of concrete proof of a completed transaction, French magistrates later declared that the memo seemed genuine.

Additionally, between 2005 and 2007, investigators examined a number of trips made to Libya by Sarkozy’s colleagues.

Ziad Takieddine, a Franco-Lebanese businessman, informed Mediapart in 2016 that he had sent suitcases full of cash from Tripoli to the Sarkozy-led French Interior Ministry. Later, he took back what he had said. A separate inquiry investigating potential witness manipulation is now focused on that reversal.

In that case, Sarkozy and his spouse, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, are both under preliminary investigations.

Sarkozy’s former ministers Claude Guéant, Brice Hortefeux, and Éric Woerth are also on trial, along with eight other defendants. But prosecutors have made clear the central figure is the former president himself — accused of knowingly benefiting from a “corruption pact” with a foreign dictatorship while campaigning to lead the French republic.

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While Sarkozy has already been convicted in two other criminal cases, the Libya affair is widely seen as the most politically explosive — and the one most likely to shape his legacy.

His conviction for influence peddling and corruption was maintained by France’s highest court in December 2024, and he was given a one-year home detention sentence with an electronic bracelet. The tapped phone calls that were discovered during the Libya probe were the source of that case. A Paris appeals court found him guilty of unlawful campaign financing in his unsuccessful 2012 reelection attempt in a separate decision in February 2024.

The accusations against Libya have been rejected by Sarkozy as politically driven and based on falsified evidence. He would be the first former French president to be found guilty of collecting illicit foreign cash in order to seek office, though, if he is proven guilty.

Later this year, a verdict is anticipated.

Credit: Africanews