Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy Sentenced to 5 Years for Libya Funding Plot

A Paris court on Sept. 25 sentenced former French President Nicolas Sarkozy to five years in prison after finding him guilty of criminal conspiracy involving a scheme to finance his 2007 election campaign with funds from the late Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi.

The court ruled that the 70-year-old will be incarcerated even if he appeals—which he said he intends to do.

Sarkozy, a conservative who was president from 2007 to 2012, was found guilty of criminal association in a plot from 2005 to 2007 to finance his first presidential campaign with funds from Libya, a former French colony, in exchange for diplomatic favors.

The court cleared him of three other charges, including passive corruption, illegal campaign financing, and concealment of the embezzlement of public funds.

‘A Scandal’: Sarkozy

“This injustice is a scandal,” Sarkozy said, denouncing the ruling.

“I ask the French people—whether they voted for me or not, whether they support me or not—to grasp what has just happened. Hatred truly knows no bounds.”

Sarkozy, who was previously found guilty of corruption but was allowed to serve his sentence from home, said that if he does end up behind bars, he will do so with his “head held high.”

The court also found two of Sarkozy’s closest allies when he was president—former ministers Claude Guéant and Brice Hortefeux—guilty of criminal association but likewise acquitted them of other related charges.

The trial shed light on France’s back-channel talks with Libya in the 2000s, when Gadhafi sought to restore diplomatic ties with the West. The North African country had been considered a pariah state for years.

The court hearing lasted several hours, with the judges finding that the men conspired to seek Libyan funding for the 2007 campaign.

Chief Judge Nathalie Gavarino told Sarkozy, “The goal of the criminal conspiracy was to give you an advantage in the electoral campaign … [and] to prepare an act of corruption at the highest possible level in the event that you were elected President of the Republic.”

She said the facts were “exceptionally serious” and “capable of undermining citizens’ trust in public institutions,” with Sarkozy having used his position as interior minister “to prepare an act of corruption at the highest level,” the judge said.

Just ‘An Idea’

Sarkozy described the funding plot as simply “an idea,” but under French law, a corruption scheme can still be treated as a crime even if money did not change hands or the transfer cannot be proven.

The judges were not satisfied that Sarkozy himself was directly involved in the financial scheme or that any Libyan funds ultimately ended up being used in his winning campaign.

Gavarino said Sarkozy allowed his close associates to reach out to Libyan authorities “to obtain or try to obtain financial support in Libya for the purpose of securing campaign financing.”

The former president was accompanied in the packed courtroom by his wife, Italian singer and former supermodel Carla Bruni, along with his three adult sons.

Sarkozy, who lost his bid for a second presidential term in 2012, denied all wrongdoing during a three-month trial earlier this year that involved 11 co-defendants, including three of his former ministers.

Despite multiple legal scandals that have dogged him for years, Sarkozy remains an influential conservative political figure in France, with his marriage to Bruni also keeping him in the media spotlight.

The allegations first surfaced in 2011, when a Libyan news agency and Gadhafi himself said the Libyan state had secretly funneled millions of euros into Sarkozy’s 2007 campaign.

Codefendant Died on Sept. 23

In 2012, French investigative outlet Mediapart published what it said was a Libyan intelligence memo referencing a 50 million-euro funding agreement. Sarkozy denounced the document as a forgery and sued the outlet for defamation. The court ruling agreed with him on this point, finding that it “now appears most likely that this document is a forgery.”

Investigators also looked into a series of trips to Libya made by Sarkozy’s associates when he served as interior minister from 2005 to 2007, including his chief of staff, French-Lebanese businessman Ziad Takieddine.

In 2016, Takieddine told Mediapart that he had delivered suitcases stuffed with cash from Tripoli to the French Interior Ministry under Sarkozy. He later retracted this statement.

Takieddine was one of the codefendants in the trial, which he did not attend, having fled to Lebanon in 2020. He died on Sept. 23 in Beirut at the age of 75.

The retraction of his statement is now the focus of a separate investigation into possible witness tampering. Both Sarkozy and his wife have been handed preliminary charges for involvement in alleged efforts to pressure Takieddine, with this case yet to go to trial.

Prosecutors alleged that Sarkozy had knowingly benefited from what they described as a “corruption pact” with Gadhafi’s government.

Libya’s longtime dictator was toppled and killed in an uprising in 2011, ending his four-decade rule of the North African country.

Sarkozy, who becomes the first French president to be sentenced to jail time, was not immediately incarcerated as the court ruled that this would take place at a later date.

The Associated Press contributed to this report