The former president of France Nicolas Sarkozy has been sentenced by the Correctional Court of Paris to five years in prison by illicit and acquitted association of the positions that weighed on him for cover -up of embezzlement of public funds and passive corruption in the Libya case for the financing of his 2007 presidential campaign.
Sarkozy was accused of having sealed “a corruption pact” in 2005 with the Libyan dictator Muamar El Gaddafi, whose regime had sent large amounts of money in exchange for financial, diplomatic and industrial counterparts, according to the accusation.
The conviction also entails a fine of 100,000 euros, compared to the 300,000 that the Prosecutor’s Office claimed, which requested seven years in prison for the former leader. The resolution indicates that the sentence will be executed even if Sarkozy resorts, and that within one month he must appear to communicate the date of entry into prison, as explained several French months.
The former president could only avoid prison if he requests and is granted probation in response to his age, because he is already 70 years old.
The sentence requires that Sarkozy’s criminal responsibility only extends until May 15, 2007: that day he assumed the position of president and the magistrates consider that he was protected by the immunity rigged to the post.
The case was made public in 2012, when the Mediapart website revealed a note by Moussa Koussa, head of Libyan Foreign Intelligence Services, dated December 10, 2006 and aimed at Bechir Saleh, Gabinet Director of Gaddafi and president of the main investment fund linked to the Libyan state.
This note authorized the financing of the Nicolas Sarkozy campaign worth 50 million euros after a meeting held in Libya on October 6, 2006 with Brice Hortefeux, close collaborator of the former French president and future minister in several of his governments.
The note has not been the proof of charge of the investigation and, in fact, the president of the Court has doubted her veracity during the reading of the sentence. It gives more value to the offices of the collaborators of the future French leader with positions of the Libyan government.
Hortefeux himself has also been sentenced to two years by illicit association and, unlike his superior, due to complicity in the electoral financing of the electoral campaign.
Claude Guéant, at the time head of Sarkozy Cabinet and later Minister of Interior, has been sentenced to six years. The Court has determined that it is guilty of the use of counterfeit documents, aggravated bleaching, influences, passive corruption and illicit association.
After announcing the sentence, Sarkozy has criticized in statements to the press that the conviction is a “scandal” and has insisted that it is “innocent.”
The President of the Court said that the then pretender to the Elyseo allowed those next two collaborators, who would subsequently occupy outstanding positions during her presidential mandate, “obtained financial support” of Tripoli for the 2007 campaign box, according to EFE.
Sarkozy has already been convicted in two previous processes, one for corruption and influence peddling, for which he was sentenced to a year in jail and is already firm; And another for the financing of his 2012 campaign, for which he was sentenced in six months in prison and is pending the appeal before the Supreme Court.
Source: www.eldiario.es
