Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy Sentenced To One Year In Prison For Illegal Campaign Finance

September 30, 2021

Photo: FRANCOIS LO PRESTI / AFP / Getty Images

By: EFE 30 of September 2021

The former French president Nicolas Sarkozy was sentenced this Thursday to one year in prison, which he may serve under house arrest, for the illegal financing of his presidential campaign of 2012, which is his second prison sentence in just over half a year.

The Court considered that the Head of State French between 2007 and 2012 benefited from a double accounting system put in place to be able to exceed the spending limits imposed by French law.

For this reason, he imposed a sentence higher than that requested by the Prosecutor’s Office, which had requested a year in jail with six months exempt from compliance.

This new judicial setback occurs after in March pa sado was sentenced in the first instance to three years in prison, two of them exempt from compliance and the other under house arrest, for corruption and influence peddling, sentence that is pending appeal.

One day after having participated in the Spanish Popular Party Convention in Madrid, Sarkozy did not attended the reading of the verdict, which was attended by most of the other defendants, all of them convicted of fraud, diversion of funds and illegal financing of the electoral campaign.

The court found that the re-election candidate’s campaign accounts exceeded by more than 20 million euros the limit of 22 millions set by law, something that was made possible by the creation of a system of false invoices through the Bygmalion company, which names the case.

The sentence dismantles the defense arguments of Nicolas Sarkozy during the process held between 20 May and 22 of last June, to which he only attended once, and which consisted in pointing out that he was ignorant of the details of his own expenses. electoral campaign.

The judges indicated that the candidate should know the nature of these and could not ignore that he was exceeding the limits in view of his electoral experience, since he had been a candidate in 2007.

Remember that the candidate was warned on two occasions by accounting experts of the exceeding of that ceiling and that, despite this, he maintained the high cost train of his campaign, at the rate of a daily rally with major media.

The judges condemned all of the 14 defendants in the case, all of them members of the Sarkozy campaign or the Bygmalion company.

It is about a new electoral blow for the former president, after last March. Then was found guilty of corruption and influence peddling , for having tried to obtain confidential information from a judge whom he promised to help obtain a high position.

In addition, since 2018 is accused of illicit financing, with money from the Libyan regime of Muammar al-Gaddafi, of his presidential campaign of 2007, which led him to the Elysee.

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