French prosecutors seek seven-year sentence for Sarkozy in Libya election finance trial

French prosecutors have requested a seven-year jail sentence and a €300,000 positive for former President Nicolas Sarkozy, in reference to allegations that his 2007 presidential marketing campaign was illegally financed by former Libyan chief Muammar Gaddafi’s authorities.

The Nationwide Monetary Prosecutor’s Workplace (PNF) additionally referred to as for a five-year ban on Sarkozy’s civic, civil and household rights, a measure that might bar him from holding elected workplace or serving in any public judicial function.

The case, which opened in January and is anticipated to conclude on 10 April, is taken into account probably the most severe of the a number of authorized scandals which have clouded Sarkozy’s post-presidency.

70-year-old Sarkozy, who led France from 2007 to 2012, faces prices of passive corruption, unlawful marketing campaign financing, concealment of embezzlement of public funds and prison affiliation.

He has denied any wrongdoing.

The allegations might be traced again to 2011, when a Libyan information company and Gaddafi himself mentioned that the Libyan state had secretly funnelled thousands and thousands of euros into Sarkozy’s 2007 marketing campaign.

In 2012, the French investigative outlet Mediapart revealed what it mentioned was a Libyan intelligence memo referencing a €50 million funding settlement.

Sarkozy denounced the doc as a forgery and sued for defamation.

French magistrates later mentioned that the memo gave the impression to be genuine, although no conclusive proof of a accomplished transaction has been introduced.

Investigators additionally seemed right into a sequence of journeys by Sarkozy’s associates to Libya between 2005 and 2007.

In 2016, Franco-Lebanese businessman Ziad Takieddine informed Mediapart that he had delivered suitcases crammed with money from Tripoli to the French Inside Ministry underneath Sarkozy.

He later retracted his assertion. That reversal is now the main focus of a separate investigation into doable witness tampering.

Sarkozy and his spouse, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, have each been positioned underneath preliminary investigation in that case.

Sarkozy’s former ministers Claude Guéant, Brice Hortefeux and Éric Woerth are additionally on trial, together with eight different defendants.

However prosecutors have made clear the central determine is the previous president himself, accused of knowingly benefiting from a “corruption pact” with a overseas dictatorship whereas campaigning to steer the French republic.

Whereas Sarkozy has already been convicted in two different prison circumstances, the Libya affair is broadly seen as probably the most politically explosive and the one most certainly to form his legacy.

In December 2024, France’s highest court docket upheld his conviction for corruption and affect peddling, sentencing him to 1 yr of home arrest with an digital tag.

That case stemmed from tapped cellphone calls uncovered throughout the Libya investigation.

In a separate ruling in February 2024, a Paris appeals court docket discovered him responsible of unlawful marketing campaign financing in his failed 2012 re-election bid.

Sarkozy has dismissed the Libya allegations as politically motivated and rooted in cast proof.

But when convicted, he would grow to be the primary former French president discovered responsible of accepting unlawful overseas funds to win workplace.

A verdict is anticipated later this yr.