Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy has been sentenced to five years in prison after a Paris court found him guilty of criminal conspiracy after campaign funding from the late Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. It is the first time in modern French history that a former head of state has been imprisoned.
Judges ruled on Thursday that Sarkozy, president of France from 2007 to 2012, benefited from secret payments from Gaddafi for his 2007 presidential campaign and ordered him to begin serving his sentence even if he appeals.
The case began in 2011, amid the brutal war that destroyed Libya, when Gaddafi’s son Saif al-Islam claimed his father had given about €50 million ($54.3 million) to Sarkozy’s campaign.
The then-French president was at the forefront of the NATO-backed regime-change war in Libya that led to Gadaffi’s brutal murder in October 2011. Unleashed after Sarkozy appeared in Benghazi to support emergent rebel groups, the war deployed thousands of Jihadists into the country, imposed a no-fly zone over it, destroyed its economy to this day, and opened an immigrant ‘corridor of misery’ into southern Europe.
In 2012, Lebanese businessman Ziad Takieddine alleged he had delivered €5 million from Tripoli to Paris in 2006, though he later withdrew the claim. French police opened a formal probe in 2013.
Prosecutors alleged while he was French interior minister, Sarkozy made a deal with Gaddafi for campaign funds in exchange for facilitating Libya’s reintegration into international politics. Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair was also involved in the project.
The court convicted Sarkozy, who dismissed the charges as a politically motivated “plot” by the “Gaddafi clan” led by “liars and crooks,” of conspiracy, but acquitted him of passive corruption, illegal campaign financing and concealment of embezzlement.
The court ruled that the conspiracy occurred between 2005 and 2007, before he gained presidential immunity.
In December 2024, France’s highest court upheld a corruption and influence-peddling conviction from 2021 against Sarkozy and ordered him to wear an electronic tag for a year. He was also sentenced for illegal campaign financing tied to his failed 2012 re-election bid, serving the term under house arrest.
Earlier in 2025, he was stripped of the Legion of Honor.
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