Sarkozy arrives at the court hearing, this Monday in a Paris court.BERTRAND GUAY / AFP
Nicolas Sarkozy became the first former president of the Fifth Republic, the French presidential regime founded in 1958, to physically sit on the dock in a criminal trial on Monday.
His predecessor and mentor, Jacques Chirac, was tried and convicted in 2011 for embezzlement of public funds, but did not attend the trial due to health problems.
Sarkozy, retired from politics but influential on the French right, is also the first president to be tried for corruption.
If convicted, he faces a penalty of up to ten years in prison and a one million euro fine.
The image of a president sitting as a defendant is not common and aroused enormous anticipation in France.
The first session, however, was brief: the trial has been suspended until Thursday.
One of the defendants along with Sarkozy, retired magistrate Gilbert Azibert, who according to the indictment was corrupted by the former president and his lawyer, has not attended the hearing.
His lawyers have alleged his fragile health to request a postponement and not expose him to the risk of the coronavirus.
The court has ordered a medical examination.
When the results are known, it will be decided whether to continue or postpone the trial.
Sarkozy, along with his lawyer Thierry Herzog and Magistrate Azibert, is accused of corruption and influence peddling in the so-called
wiretapping
case
or
Paul Bismuth case
.
In 2014, during an investigation into alleged illegal financing of his first presidential campaign with Libyan money, judges tapped a mobile phone of the former president and his lawyer registered under the name of Bismuth.
What they discovered was what gives rise to the trial that has just begun: the attempt to obtain from Magistrate Azibert, and in exchange for favors, information about a third court case that affected Sarkozy.
The
wiretapping case
is one more in a series of cases in which Sarkozy is under the scrutiny of Justice.
In March, the trial should be held for the so-called
Bygmalion case
on the expenses of the 2012 electoral campaign. And he is charged with the alleged financing of the electoral campaign that brought him to power in 2007 with money from Muammar Gaddafi's Libya.
The recent change in version of one of the main testimonies, that of the French-Lebanese Ziad Takieddine, who claimed to have brought Sarkozy briefcases of money when he was Minister of the Interior, has given hope to the former president and reinforced his idea that there is a judicial conspiracy against him.
The
wiretapping case
began when, in late 2013 and early 2014, the judges in the Libyan money case discovered that Sarkozy and Herzog, suspecting they were being wiretapped, had decided to communicate via pay phone by the fictional Paul Bismuth (named after a former classmate of Herzog's).
The conversations that interested the researchers, however, were not about Libya but about something else.
The former president and the lawyer allegedly wanted to find out about an appeal they had filed with the Court of Cassation.
The appeal was intended to prevent the presidential agendas seized in the framework of another investigation, the
Bettencourt case
, from
being used for other investigations
, in which the former president was indicted and later exonerated.
From the conversations, it is deduced that Sarkozy offered Azibert, general counsel in the Court of Cassation, to influence him to obtain a position in the Council of State of the Principality of Monaco in exchange for information on the appeal related to the agendas.