He will be a good neighbor with his luxury watch. It is an electronic bracelet that Nicolas Sarkozy, 69, will soon have to wear for a year, after having exhausted all possible suspensive appeals. This Wednesday, December 18, the Court of Cassation confirmed for good his sentence to three years in prison, including one for corruption and influence peddling, in the so-called Bismuth affair. The Paris Court of Appeal, in its benevolence, proclaimed in May 2023 that “the farm part will be fitted out under electronic home surveillance”after having made harsh remarks about Nicolas Sarkozy, pointing out “hidden arrangements intended to benefit private interests, all the more serious as they were committed by a former President of the Republic, guarantor of the independence of justice, who had the duty to behave as a perfectly respectable citizen “.
Most picturesque affair
And the cherry on the cake, three years of deprivation of civil rights, therefore of running for an election, if he felt like it. And even donning the robe of a lawyer at the bar of a court – this is his original profession, which he has since re-embraced, content to deliver more or less valuable advice. An unprecedented sanction for a former President of the Republic. Nicolas Sarkozy should be summoned – in principle within a period of less than a month – before a sentence enforcement judge (JAP), who will determine the terms of his bracelet, which will be placed later. In practice, his installation will require him to stay at home at certain times of the day, generally at night: goodbye to generously paid conferences abroad and dinners in town.
This is not the worst case targeting the former tenant of the Elysée, but the most picturesque, especially as it takes place at the confluence of other criminal investigations. In 2014, knowing that he had been wiretapped in the Libyan case (the criminal trial for which will open on January 6, 2025, over three months), Nicolas Sarkozy and his lawyer Thierry Herzog set up a dedicated line under an assumed name , the now famous Paul Bismuth. They then spoke very freely about the Bettencourt affair: the first had certainly just obtained a dismissal of the case for abuse of weakness of the billionaire heiress of L’Oreal, but he was above all concerned to obtain from the Court of Cassation the restitution of his presidential notebooks and diaries. The second then promises him the intervention of a high magistrate, Gilbert Azibert. For the price of its services: “boost” with a view to obtaining his nomination for a position as honorary as it is well paid in the Monegasque high judiciary.
And now, the Bygmalion affair
There will be no action, Nicolas Sarkozy finally obtaining the return of his diaries through the normal route and Gilbert Azibert will not go into early retirement in Monaco. But in matters of corruption, intention alone is enough to characterize the crime. Hence his conviction. In Cassation, the defense once again argued the illegality of telephone tapping between a lawyer and his client. Emmanuel Piwnica, Thierry Herzog’s lawyer, criticized at the hearing a procedure which “should never have seen the light of day”speaking of a file where “we no longer count the illegalities committed, the breaches, the attacks on fundamental rights”. But do the dark dealings on the Bismuth line fall into this category of professional secrecy? The highest French court answered no: “It does not follow from the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights that the words exchanged between them on a wiretapped telephone line are prohibited from being used against a lawyer’s client if the words reveal indications likely to give rise to a presumption of the lawyer’s participation in a criminal offence. » End of the match and indignation of principle.
Except that Nicolas Sarkozy does not intend to let go of the matter, with an appeal to the ECHR, but which is not suspensive. On X (ex-Tweeter), he said to himself “victim for twelve years of legal harassment over a so-called corruption pact without any compensation. » His lawyer, Patrick Spinosi, justifies this final procedural skirmish for “obtain the rights that French judges have denied him. » Within the sarkozie with outraged dignity, Thierry Saussez, formerly and clearly currently communicating from his sphere of influence, proclaimed on BFMTV: “It’s a sad day, a stain on French justice, but the truth will ultimately triumph. »
But Nicolas Sarkozy is perhaps not finished with electronic bracelets, because a second one hangs on his wrist or more surely on his ankle (its location point most often used): in the Bygmalion affair, either the illegal financing of his 2012 presidential campaign (42.8 million euros spent, double the authorized ceiling of 22.5), the court of appeal confirmed in February 2023 his sentence to one year in prison, the half suspended, the firm part being convertible under remote surveillance. But here again an appeal to the Supreme Court is underway, a decision to come in 2025, delaying this new, perhaps fatal, deadline.
