The French Supreme Court confirmed this Wednesday the conviction for corruption and influence peddling against former president Nicolas Sarkozy, making that sentence final. The one who was a tenant of the Elysée between 2007 and 2012 must wear an electronic bracelet for a year, which makes him the first former French president forced to serve a sentence of house arrest. Jacques Chirac was also sentenced, but to an exempt sentence.
Sarkozy’s lawyers have hinted that they will appeal to the European Court of Human Rights, based in Strasbourg, but that does not suspend the application of the sentence. Sarkozy, 69, must appear within a month before a freedom and detention judge, who will establish the modalities in which he will wear the electronic bracelet and other conditions of his house arrest. The former president thus suffers a huge legal setback, one more of those that justice has reserved for him since his departure from the Elysée in 2012, defeated by the socialist Farnçois Hollande.
Although removed from the political front line, Sarkozy continues to have great influence on the French right and maintains regular contacts with the current president, Emmanuel Macron. In addition, he is a regular in the Parc des Princes box, his books become great bestsellers and he chains dedications throughout the country, despite the busy judicial agenda that he carries, which has led to his first final conviction in the country. It is due to a case of corruption and influence peddling, known in France as the ‘Bismuth case’, in reference to the false name that Sarkozy chose to open a secondary telephone line.
It marked the first sentence for the former president, handed down by the Paris Correctional Facility in March 2021, a sentence confirmed on appeal in May 2023, three years in prison, although only one effective, with the possibility of serving it under house arrest and with a electronic bracelet, a penalty that has now been confirmed by the Supreme Court.
The investigations were opened when investigators, who had Sarkozy’s phones under surveillance in 2014 in the context of another case, discovered that his lawyer had opened a secondary line with which they maintained communications and that it was also tapped. In the wiretaps they discovered conversations that pointed to a case of alleged corruption and influence peddling.
Specifically, Sarkozy and his lawyer spoke of contacts with a magistrate, Gilbert Azibert, from whom they asked for information about the investigation of another of the accusations against him in exchange for the former president using his influence to get him an honorary position in Monaco.
These wiretaps served to open an investigation that ended up making Sarkozy the first former French president to sit in the dock, since Chirac did not do so for medical reasons.
Sarkozy has a long string of pending accounts with justice ahead of him.
The most immediate will come on January 6, when the trial opens for the alleged illegal financing of his 2007 campaign with money from the Libyan regime of Muammar Gaddafi, a process that he could already attend with the electronic bracelet.
In that trial, scheduled until April 10, two of his former Interior Ministers, Claude Guéant and Brice Hortefeux, will sit in the dock.
Sarkozy, who won the presidential election against the socialist Ségolène Royal, faces a sentence of up to ten years in prison.
The case of illegal financing of the 2012 campaign is also pending. Last February he was sentenced on appeal to one year in prison, only half of which with compliance and also with an electronic bracelet, which the president does not yet wear because He also appealed to the Supreme Court, which will not rule until the second half of 2025.
In this scandal, he was condemned for having far exceeded, from 22.5 million to almost 44 million, the spending limits in his campaign, through a system of false invoices that allowed him to hide the investment in his expensive rallies.
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