The Court of Cassation on Wednesday rejected Nicolas Sarkozy’s appeal in the wiretapping affair, making definitive his sentence to one year in prison under an electronic bracelet for corruption and influence peddling, an unprecedented sanction for a former head of the State.
Until now suspended, this sentence, to which is added three years of ineligibility, is now applicable: Nicolas Sarkozy, 69 years old, will be summoned before a sentence enforcement judge who will have to determine the terms of his electronic bracelet .
This is the first definitive conviction of the former president (2007-2012).
Nice, March 4, 2014 at dawn. Me Thierry Herzog receives an unexpected visit from the judicial police in his apartment, a stone’s throw from the Promenade des Anglais. Computers, telephones… Investigators are looking for traces compromising exchanges between the lawyer and his most famous client and friend, Nicolas Sarkozy. “The Paul Bismuth affair” is in its early stages.
Phones purchased in a Nice store
The same day, sleuths from the central anti-corruption office also searched in Paris (still at Mr. Herzog’s house, but in his office this time), or in Bordeaux, at the home of high magistrate Gilbert Azibert.
In Nice, the police take a mini-detour through the pedestrian zone.
Direction a telephone shop, rue Masséna, where Thierry Herzog went a few weeks earlier.
It was there, in the heart of tourist Nice, that he discreetly acquired two smartphones. With two dedicated chips.
It is therefore these “OCDs”, these “idiots” as the police call them, who allowed the ex-president and his faithful counsel to converse, far from the big ears of justice. Or so they believed.
On February 22, 2014, a “terminal” call near the Cap Nègre residence where Nicolas Sarkozy resides. This brief Var exchange confirmed to the magistrates the existence of a secret telephone line, established with the fictitious name “Paul Bismuth”.
The affair will enrage the real Paul Bismuthreal estate developer in Tel Aviv. Judicial history will record that the Côte d’Azur, a Sarkozy bastion long deemed impregnable, gave rise to a very embarrassing affair for its former champion.
As we revealed then, it was twenty kilometers away, in Monaco, that the Sarkozy-Herzog tandem would have dangled a prestigious position to Gilbert Azibert.
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