Paris, Feb 14 (EFE).- A French appeals court on Wednesday confirmed former president Nicolas Sarkozy’s sentence for illegal financing of his 2012 reelection bid.
The court also reduced Sarkozy’s one-year sentence from 2021 to six months in prison, with six months suspended.
Lawyers representing Sarkozy, 69, who has insisted he is innocent, said he would appeal the latest ruling to the Supreme Court, meaning he will not yet be imprisoned.
Sarkozy, the first former French head of state to be sentenced to a prison sentence in another case, went to the Court of Appeal in Paris to hear the verdict, but left the courthouse without making a statement.
In remarks to the press, his lawyer, Vincent Desry, said Sarkozy would appeal to the Supreme Court, calling the verdict “questionable”, while reiterating that his client “is innocent” and that “no evidence implicates him” in the facts of which he is accused.
The latest sentence means Sarkozy faces up to a year and half in prison.
In May last year, the Court of Appeal confirmed a one-year sentence in a case of influence peddling. That case is also being heard by the Supreme Court.
He will also be tried next year for allegedly financing his 2007 campaign – which won him the presidency – with money from the Libyan regime of Muammar Gaddafi.
In parallel to the latter investigation, Sarkozy is also being prosecuted for trying to pressure a key witness.
Sarkozy is also implicated in a corruption probe relating to Qatar’s successful 2022 World Cup bid.
In the case of the illegal financing of the 2012 campaign – which he lost to Socialist François Hollande – the judges found that a system of false invoices had been created through a company called Bygmalion to conceal the expenses and thereby exceed the legally permitted spending limits.
The former president spent nearly 43 million euros – almost double the allowed amount – in an attempt to reverse polls that predicted he would lose the election.
Although in the first instance the magistrates found no link between Sarkozy and the scheme of false invoices, they found that he must have been aware of it and that he had pushed for more rallies to be held, despite official warnings about the campaign’s high spending.
The former president denounced the allegations as “fabrications” and “lies” during the appeal trial held between November 8 and December 7, in which he tried to deflect responsibility to members of his campaign and Bygmalion, whom he accuses of having enriched themselves at his expense.
After hearing the sentence, his lawyer said “Sarkozy is innocent” and compared his client’s conviction with the acquittal last week of former minister François Bayrou, a centrist ally of the president, Emmanuel Macron, in a case of illegal financing of his political party.
On that occasion, despite ruling that MEPs of Bayrou’s party had used European Parliament assistants for party functions, the court found that he was not responsible, despite being the party president.
Now, the judges have ruled that Sarkozy was indeed responsible for the scheme of false invoices from which he benefited, although there is no evidence that he knew of their existence.
His lawyer Desry decried “double standards” and insisted that the legal precedent set by the Bayrou case should mean the former president should have been acquitted.
Desert said that a “combative” Sarkozy would continue to fight to prove his innocence. EFE
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