Former President Nicolas Sarkozy was sentenced on appeal this Wednesday February 14 to one year in prison, six months of which were suspended.
Nicolas Sarkozy was sentenced on appeal this Wednesday, February 14 to one year in prison, six months of which were suspended. The public prosecutor had requested a one-year suspended prison sentence against the former head of state, who had already been sentenced at first instance in 2021 to one year in prison for having exceeded the legal spending limit for his campaign of 2012, when he was running for his own succession.
The firm part of the sentence imposed on the former president will be adjusted, said the president of the court while reading her decision, adding that the court had returned to the quantum required in first instance by the public prosecutor. However, the former president’s lawyer, Vincent Desry, announced his wish to appeal to the Court of Cassation.
A double invoicing system had been put in place by the company Bygmalion, the company organizing the candidate’s meetings. She had attributed a large part of the cost of the meetings to the UMP, under the cover of fictitious conventions. Thirteen other people were also sentenced to sentences of up to three and a half years in prison, part of which was suspended. Nine of them, and the former president, appealed and were retried from November 8 to December 7, 2023.
Nicolas Sarkozy was certainly not directly blamed for the system of false invoices designed to hide the explosion in his campaign’s expenses which had peaked at nearly 43 million euros, almost double the legal ceiling set at 22.5 million. But, in its first instance judgment, the court emphasized that the former tenant of the Élysée had continued to organize electoral meetings, requesting one meeting per day, even though he had been warned in writing of the risk of legal overrun, then actual overrun.
Read also :
House Republicans impeach Alejandro Mayorkas over his handling of the migration crisis
