A French court on Monday sentenced former President Nicolas Sarkozy to three years in prison for corruption and influence-peddling, but suspended two years of the sentence.
Nicholas Sarkozy served as a President of France from 2007 to 2012. The court found him guilty of trying to illegally obtain information from a senior magistrate back in 2014 about an ongoing investigation into his campaign finances.
The judge stated that Sarkozy did not need to serve time in jail. Instead, he could serve the sentence by wearing an electronic bracelet at home.
This is an historic ruling considering that Nicolas becomes the first former president to be handed a jail sentence in the country’s modern times.
The prosecutor had requested for two years in prison and two years of suspended sentence for the former president as well as his co-defendants. Nicolas was presented by lawyer Thierry Herzog and Gilbert Azibert. The two lawyers were also found guilty and handed prison sentences.
This has been a long-running court case from 2013 when investigators bugged phones belonging to Sarkozy and his lawyer Herzog. This wiretapping helped them discover that Sarkozy had promised a senior magistrate Gilbert Azibert a big position in Monaco in exchange for information concerning an ongoing inquiry into claims that the former French president, Sarkozy, had accepted illegal payments from Liliane Bettencourt for his presidential campaigns in 2007.
Sarkozy had not declared his presidential ambition for France in 2022 but many political analysts had predicted that and many from his political party, Les Republicains were in full support of his return.
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