France’s Sarkozy awaits the verdict of corruption trial

On Monday, a French court will rule on former President Nicolas Sarkozy’s corruption trial, with prosecutors asking that he be sentenced to prison.

Sarkozy is accused of seeking to bribe a judge and of influence-peddling in exchange for inside information on an inquiry into his presidential campaign finances. He was France’s president from 2007 to 2012 and remains popular among conservatives.

Prosecutors told the court that the 66-year-old should be sentenced to four years in prison, with at least two years served. Sarkozy testified that he was the victim of lies and that he had never committed a crime of corruption.

“Never. Never abused my influence, alleged or real,” he told the court in December. “What right do they have to drag me through the mud like this for six years? Is there no rule of law?”

Prosecutors say Sarkozy offered judge Gilbert Azibert a lucrative job in Monaco in exchange for classified details regarding an investigation into claims that he took illicit payments from L’Oreal heiress Liliane Bettencourt for his 2007 presidential campaign.

This came to light, they say, while they were wiretapping conversations between Sarkozy and his lawyer Thierry Herzog after Sarkozy left office, in relation to another investigation into alleged Libyan financing of that 2007 campaign.

Azibert, at the time a magistrate at France’s top appeals court for criminal cases and well-informed on the Bettencourt inquiry, did not get the job in Monaco.

Prosecutors are seeking the same punishment for Azibert and Herzog, who are on trial alongside Sarkozy.

Sarkozy’s predecessor, Jacques Chirac, is the only other president under France’s post-war Fifth Republic to have faced trial after leaving office.

Chirac, who died in 2019, was found guilty in 2011 of presiding over a system of ghost jobs in Paris City Hall for political cronies when he was mayor of the capital. Handed a two-year suspended sentence, Chirac escaped serving time in jail.