Paris (EFE).- The Prosecutor General’s Office of the Paris Court of Appeals requested a seven-year prison sentence for former French President Nicolas Sarkozy (2007-2012) on Wednesday, two years more than his initial sentence, for receiving funding from the Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi for his 2007 presidential campaign, or at least attempting to do so.
Prosecutor Rodolphe Juy-Birmann also requested that Sarkozy be disqualified from holding public office for five years and be fined 300,000 euros.
Juy-Birmann stressed that he was requesting the harshest penalty for Sarkozy out of all the defendants in the case because Sarkozy was the «instigator of the acts» and the «main and sole beneficiary,» all to be elected president of France.
In an initial reaction to the press, Christophe Ingrain, Sarkozy’s lawyer, said that during the defense’s closing arguments in the next 15 days, they will prove Nicolas Sarkozy’s innocence.
Ingrain insisted that «there was no Libyan money in his campaign or his assets» and that his election was not biased.
He asked the court to take into account that the facts to be judged are not just any scenario, but rather, a corruption pact established at the highest level before Sarkozy’s election. Through this pact, Sarkozy committed to lifting the Gaddafi regime out of the international ostracism it had endured for years.
The Attorney General’s Office demanded that Sarkozy be convicted of all four of the crimes of which he stands accused, not just the crime of criminal association, which was the only one proven in the initial 2025 trial.
In that process, during which the Prosecutor’s Office requested a seven-year sentence for the same four charges, the court sentenced him to five years in prison with provisional execution, resulting in his imprisonment for 20 days last autumn, after which he was released under judicial control.
The judges also imposed a five-year disqualification from holding public office and a 100,000 euro fine.
The Attorney General’s Office wants the judges to impose a harsher sentence this time, arguing that evidence has proven an agreement between Muammar Gaddafi and Nicolas Sarkozy.
According to the agreement, Sarkozy and his associate, Claude Guéant, promised to support the Libyan regime in exchange for campaign funds.
Specifically, they acted to lift the international arrest warrant on Abdullah Senussi, Gaddafi’s lieutenant and brother-in-law.
Senoussi was sentenced to life imprisonment in France for his role in an attack on a plane that exploded in mid-flight over Niger. The attack killed all 170 people on board, including 54 French citizens. EFE
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