A first definitive conviction for Nicolas Sarkozy. The Court of Cassation rendered its decision on Wednesday, December 18, in the wiretapping case. In this case, also known as the “Paul Bismuth affair”, the high court rejected the appeal of the former President of the Republic. He was thus definitively sentenced for corruption and influence peddling to three years of imprisonment, one year of which was spent under an electronic bracelet. An unprecedented sanction for a former French head of state.
This sentence, to which is added three years of ineligibility, will therefore be applied: Nicolas Sarkozy will be summoned – in principle within a period of less than a month – before a sentence enforcement judge (JAP), who will set the terms of his bracelet, placed later.
The defense of Nicolas Sarkozy, who will be 70 years old on January 28, could immediately request conditional release, as provided for by law for septuagenarians. The decision to grant it or not will nevertheless rest with the JAP.
“The truth will ultimately triumph”commented Nicolas Sarkozy on social networks, proclaiming his innocence and denouncing a “profound injustice”which he attributes to a “corporatist and political climate” in justice. He believes he was convicted of “so-called ‘corruption pact'”claiming to have never discussed with the magistrate at the heartheart of the matter.
His lawyer Patrice Spinosi said in a press release that his client “will obviously comply with the sanction pronounced” but that he “will refer the matter to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in the coming weeks, as he is now entitled to do, to obtain the guarantee of rights that French judges have denied him.”
“For the first time, in France, a person is criminally convicted on the sole basis of comments that were overheard while he was speaking with his lawyer.lamented Patrice Spinosi.
In this Bismuth case, the former head of state was convicted on appeal on May 17, 2023, for having entered into a “corruption pact” in 2014, alongside his historic lawyer Thierry Herzog, with Gilbert Azibert, top magistrate at the Court of Cassation, so that he can transmit information and try to influence an appeal filed by Nicolas Sarkozy in the Bettencourt affair. And this, in exchange for a “boost” promised for an honorary post in Monaco.
The three men were given the same sentence, with the lawyer banned from wearing black robes for three years. Claiming their innocence from the start, they filed appeals, raising 20 arguments examined during a hearing on November 6, after which the decision was reserved. But thehe Court of Cassation, which controls the proper application of the law and not the merits of the cases, also rejected the appeals of Thierry Herzog and Gilbert Azibert, who in fact are also definitively convicted.
Emmanuel Piwnica, lawyer on the advice of Thierry Herzog, criticized 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”. For years, the Sarkozy camp has believed that the National Financial Prosecutor’s Office (PNF) has unfairly “hidden” a parallel investigation, aimed at flushing out a mole who would have informed the former President of the Republic and his lawyer that they were being wiretapped. The lawyers also contested the legality of the wiretapping at the heart of the case, a subject already debated many times in this case.
This conviction comes as the former tenant of the Elysée must appear from January 6, and for four months, at the Paris court, in the case of suspicion of Libyan financing of his 2007 presidential campaign. He faces ten years in prison and five years of ineligibility for passive corruption, illegal financing of electoral campaigns, criminal conspiracy and concealment of embezzlement of Libyan public funds.
Still in 2025, the Court of Cassation will also have to rule on the former president’s appeal against his sentence to one year in prison, including six months in the Bygmalion affair, concerning the excessive spending of his 2012 presidential campaign.
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