Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy said he will ‘sleep in prison with my head held high’, after he was sentenced to five years in jail on Thursday. 

The former leader was today found guilty of criminal conspiracy over efforts by close aides to procure funds for his 2007 presidential bid from Libya during the rule of late dictator Muammar Gaddafi.

Sarkozy, 70, was acquitted by a Paris court of all other charges, including corruption and receiving illegal campaign financing.

But the ruling means the former president will spend time in jail even if he appeals, a sentence much harsher than many expected.

Sarkozy has already said he will appeal the verdict, which he denounced as ‘extremely serious for rule of law’.

In a small win for the ex-president, the court ordered that Sarkozy should be placed in custody at a later date, with prosecutors given one month to inform the former head of state when he should go to prison, sparing the 70-year-old the humiliation of being marched out of the courtroom by police officers and going straight to jail.

Judge Nathalie Gavarino ruled that Sarkozy was guilty of having ‘allowed his close associates to act with a view to obtaining financial support from the Libyan regime’. 

It is the first time that a former French head of state has been found guilty of trying to use foreign money in such a manner. 

Sarkozy, who was elected in 2007 but lost his bid for re-election in 2012, denied all wrongdoing during a three-month trial earlier this year that also involved 11 co-defendants, including three former ministers.

Sarkozy, accompanied by his wife, the singer and model Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, entered into a courtroom filled with reporters and members of the public. Sarkozy sat in the front row of the defendants’ seats. His three adult sons were also in the room. 

Despite multiple legal scandals that have clouded his presidential legacy, Sarkozy remains an influential figure in Right-wing politics in France and in entertainment circles, by virtue of his marriage to Bruni-Sarkozy.

The accusations trace their roots to 2011, when a Libyan news agency and Gadhafi himself said the Libyan state had secretly funnelled millions of euros into Sarkozy’s 2007 campaign.

In 2012, the French investigative outlet Mediapart published what it said was a Libyan intelligence memo referencing a 50 million-euro funding agreement. Sarkozy denounced the document as a forgery and sued for defamation.

French magistrates later said that the memo appeared to be authentic, though no conclusive evidence of a completed transaction was presented at the three-month Paris trial.

Investigators also looked into a series of trips to Libya made by people close to Sarkozy when he served as interior minister from 2005 and 2007, including his chief of staff.

In 2016, Franco-Lebanese businessman Ziad Takieddine told Mediapart that he had delivered suitcases filled with cash from Tripoli to the French Interior Ministry under Sarkozy. He later retracted his statement.

That reversal is now the focus of a separate investigation into possible witness tampering. Both Sarkozy and his wife, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, were handed preliminary charges for involvement in alleged efforts to pressure Takieddine. That case has not gone to trial yet.

Takieddine, who was one of the co-defendants, died on Tuesday in Beirut, his lawyer Elise Arfi said. He was 75. He had fled to Lebanon in 2020 and did not attend the trial.

Sarkozy was tried on charges of passive corruption, illegal campaign financing, concealment of the embezzlement of public funds and criminal association. Prosecutors alleged that Sarkozy had knowingly benefited from what they described as a ‘corruption pact’ with Gaddafi’s government.

Libya’s longtime dictator was toppled and killed in an uprising in 2011, ending his four-decade rule of the North African country.

The trial shed light on France’s back-channel talks with Libya in the 2000s, when Gaddafi was seeking to restore diplomatic ties with the West. Before that, Libya was considered a pariah state.

Sarkozy has dismissed the allegations as politically motivated and reliant on forged evidence. During the trial, he denounced a ‘plot’ he said was staged by ‘liars and crooks’ including the ‘Gaddafi clan.’

He suggested that the allegations of campaign financing were retaliation for his call – as France’s president – for Gaddafi’s removal.

Sarkozy was one of the first Western leaders to push for military intervention in Libya in 2011, when Arab Spring pro-democracy protests swept the Arab world.

‘What credibility can be given to such statements marked by the seal of vengeance?’ Sarkozy asked in comments during the trial.

In June, Sarkozy was stripped of his Legion of Honor medal – France’s highest award – after his conviction in a separate case.

Earlier, he was found guilty of corruption and influence peddling for trying to bribe a magistrate in 2014 in exchange for information about a legal case in which he was implicated.

Sarkozy was sentenced to wear an electronic monitoring bracelet for one year. He was granted a conditional release in May due to his age, which allowed him to remove the electronic tag after he wore it for just over three months.

In another case, Sarkozy was convicted last year of illegal campaign financing in his failed 2012 reelection bid. He was accused of having spent almost twice the maximum legal amount and was sentenced to a year in prison, of which six months were suspended.

Sarkozy has denied the allegations. He has appealed that verdict to the highest Court of Cassation, and that appeal is pending