Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy was sentenced to five years in prison in the case of suspected illegal campaign funds from the late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi.
Sarkozy, 70, was found guilty on Thursday of criminal conspiracy in a scheme from 2005 to 2007 to finance his campaign with funds from Libya in exchange for diplomatic favours.
He was acquitted of the remaining charges laid against him, including receiving stolen goods, embezzlement of public funds and passive corruption.
He will be summoned within a month by the prosecutor’s office, who will inform him of his incarceration date, according to the French newspaper Le Monde. The ruling means he will spend time in jail even if he launches an appeal.
Sarkozy, who was president of France from 2007 to 2012, had always denied the charges and dismissed the allegations as politically motivated.
Speaking to reporters after the verdict, he said: “I will comply with the summonses of the courts. And if they absolutely want me to sleep in prison, I will sleep in prison. But with my head held high. I am innocent.
“This injustice is a scandal. I will not apologise for what I did not do.”
He continued: “Those who hate me so much think they are humiliating me. What they have humiliated today is France, it is the image of France. And if anyone has betrayed the French, it is not me, it is this incredible injustice that you have just witnessed.
“I have no spirit of revenge, no hatred, but let everyone understand and hear: I will fight until my last breath to prove my complete innocence .”
The verdict by a Paris court follows a three-month trial earlier this year that also involved 11 co-defendants, including three former ministers.
Franco-Lebanese businessman Ziad Takieddine, 75, who was one of the co-defendants and a key accuser in the case, died on Tuesday in Beirut following a cardiac arrest, his lawyer said.
Takieddine had claimed he had helped deliver up to €5m (£4.4m) in cash from Gaddafi to Sarkozy in 2006 and 2007. In an interview with the French investigative outlet Mediapart in 2016, Takieddine said he had delivered suitcases filled with cash from Tripoli to the French interior ministry under Sarkozy.
He later retracted his statement, then contradicted his retraction, prompting a separate investigation into possible witness tampering. Both Sarkozy and his wife, model and musician Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, were handed preliminary charges of pressuring a witness. That case is pending trial.
Investigators claimed Sarkozy had forged a corrupt pact with the Libyan government in a murky affair that involved Libyan spies, a convicted terrorist and arms dealers.
Delivering her judgement on Thursday, presiding judge, Nathalie Gavarino, said there was no proof that Sarkozy made such a deal with Gaddafi, nor that the money sent from Libya reached Sarkozy’s campaign, even if the timing was “compatible” and the paths the money went through were “very opaque”.
However, she found Sarkozy guilty of criminal conspiracy for allowing close aides to engage with people in Libya to secure campaign financing.
The accusations can be traced back to 2011, when Gaddafi revealed that the Libyan state had secretly funnelled millions of euros into Sarkozy’s 2007 campaign. Gaddafi was toppled and killed during the Arab spring in 2011, ending his four-decade rule of Libya.
Despite facing a string of legal battles since leaving office, and being stripped of the Legion of Honour, France’s highest award, Sarkozy retains some influence behind the scenes in French politics. He and his wife were among the guests invited to the reopening of Notre-Dame Cathedral in December last year.
In February this year, Sarkozy was ordered to wear an electronic tag for a year, a first for a former French president, after being found guilty of corruption and influence peddling. The tag was removed after three months.
In a separate case, Sarkozy was convicted last year of illegal campaign-financing in his failed 2012 re-election bid. He was accused of having spent almost twice the maximum legal amount and was sentenced to a year in prison, of which six months were suspended. Sarkozy has denied the allegations and has appealed the ruling.
