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The former French president Nicolas Sarkozy has been found guilty of criminal conspiracy in a trial in which he and aides were accused of making an alleged corruption pact with the regime of the late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi to receive funding for the 2007 French presidential election campaign.
But Sarkozy was acquitted of three other charges, including passive corruption and illegal campaign financing.
As the head judge, Nathalie Gavarino, continued to read the verdict on Thursday, Sarkozy was found guilty of criminal conspiracy but acquitted of charges of corruption, misuse of Libyan public funds and illegal election campaign funding. Sentencing has not yet been announced.
Sarkozy, who had denied all wrongdoing in court, is expected to immediately appeal.
Prosecutors had told the court that Sarkozy and his aides devised a “corruption pact” with Gaddafi and the Libyan regime in 2005 to illegally fund Sarkozy’s victorious presidential election bid two years later.
The court had heard that in return for the money, the Libyan regime requested diplomatic, legal and business favours and it was understood that Sarkozy would rehabilitate Gaddafi’s international image. The autocratic Libyan leader, whose brutal 41-year rule was marked by human rights abuses, had been isolated internationally over his regime’s connection to terrorism, including the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie in Scotland in December 1988.
Members of Sarkozy’s entourage were accused by prosecutors of meeting members of Gaddafi’s regime in Libya in 2005, when Sarkozy was interior minister. Soon after becoming French president in 2007, Sarkozy then invited the Libyan leader for a lengthy state visit to Paris, setting up his Bedouin tent in gardens near the Élysée Palace. Sarkozy was the first western leader to welcome Gaddafi on a full state visit since the freeze in relations in the 1980s over his pariah status as a sponsor of state terrorism.
But in 2011, Sarkozy put France at the forefront of Nato-led airstrikes against Gaddafi’s troops that helped rebel fighters topple his regime. Gaddafi was captured by rebels in October 2011 and killed.
The allegations of a secret campaign funding pact with the Libyan regime had been the biggest corruption trial faced by Sarkozy, 70, who was rightwing president from 2007 to 2012. He has already been convicted in two separate cases and stripped of France’s highest distinction, the Legion of Honour.
In the first case, Sarkozy was convicted of corruption and influence peddling over illegal attempts to secure favours from a judge. He was given a one-year jail term, which he served this year with an electronic tag for three months before being granted conditional release. It was the first time a former French head of state had been forced to wear an electronic tag. Sarkozy had to wear the tag into the Paris criminal court during part of the trial over Libya campaign funding.
In a second case, Sarkozy was convicted of hiding illegal overspending in the 2012 presidential election that he lost to the Socialist candidate, François Hollande. He has appealed against both convictions.
Despite his convictions, Sarkozy continues to meet and be consulted by key figures on the right and centre. He recently met his former protege, the new prime minister Sébastien Lecornu, who has yet to form a new government after the last government collapsed in a no-confidence vote earlier this month.
On Thursday, Claude Guéant, who was director of Sarkozy’s 2007 presidential campaign before being made Sarkozy’s chief-of-staff and then interior minister, was found guilty of criminal conspiracy and corruption.
Brice Hortefeux, another Sarkozy ally, who also served as interior minister, was found guilty of criminal conspiracy but acquitted of illegal campaign funding. Both he and Guéant are likely to appeal against their convictions.
Éric Woerth, another former minister who was Sarkozy’s head of campaign financing in 2007 and has since moved to Emmanuel Macron’s centrist party, was acquitted.
In a sudden turn of events this week, the Franco-Lebanese businessman, Ziad Takieddine, who told the investigative website Mediapart in a filmed interview in 2016 that he had helped deliver suitcases of cash from Gaddafi to Sarkozy’s entourage, died of a heart attack in Beirut two days before the verdict.
In 2020, Takieddine had suddenly retracted his incriminating statement about transporting suitcases of cash in the Libya case, prompting accusations that Sarkozy and close allies paid him off, something they have always denied. Shortly afterwards, Takieddine contradicted his own retraction. A separate legal case has been opened into Takieddine’s retraction. Sarkozy and his wife, the singer and former model Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, and several others have been placed under formal investigation on suspicion of putting pressure on a witness over Takieddine retracting his allegations. They all deny any wrongdoing.
