Former President Nicolas Sarkozy was convicted again this Wednesday, on appeal, in the Bygmalion affair.
The sentence of one year in prison, including six months suspended, is
lighter
than that pronounced in first instance which had earned him a year in prison.
This case concerns the amount of campaign expenses in the race for the presidency of the Republic in 2012.
In September 2021, the Paris criminal court found the former head of state (2007-2012) guilty of having largely exceeded the legal spending limit and sentenced him to one year in prison for illegal financing of campaign.
The court, however, requested that this sentence be directly modified, at home under electronic surveillance.
Thirteen other people were also sentenced to sentences of up to three and a half years in prison, part of which was suspended.
Nicolas Sarkozy and nine others appealed and were retried from November 8 to December 7, 2023.
“Fables” and “lies”
In this case, investigations revealed that to hide the explosion in his campaign's expenses (nearly 43 million euros for an authorized maximum of 22.5 million) a double invoicing system had been put in place.
He attributed a large part of the cost of the meetings to the UMP (the former name of the Les Républicains party), under the cover of fictitious conventions.
Unlike his co-defendants, the former president is not accused of this system of false invoices.
But, in its judgment, the criminal court had underlined that the former tenant of the Élysée had “continued the organization of electoral meetings”, by “requesting one per day”, even though he “had been warned in writing » of the risk of legal overrun, then of the actual overrun.
During the appeal trial, the attorneys general requested a year's imprisonment against him, but this time with a suspended sentence.
Nicolas Sarkozy, as during the first trial, “vigorously contested any criminal responsibility”, denouncing “fables” and “lies”.
His lawyer, Me Vincent Desry, pleaded for his release, ensuring that the former head of state had “never been aware of an excess” of the legal ceiling for electoral expenses and “never incurred any expenses”.
He considered that it had been “impossible” for the public prosecutor to “demonstrate the intentional element” nor the “material element” of the alleged offense.
Other ongoing cases
Against the other defendants, the attorneys general requested sentences of eighteen months to four years' imprisonment, all suspended, as well as fines of 10,000 euros to 30,000 euros and bans on practicing or ineligibility. for some of them.
Among those who were part of the UMP, only Jérôme Lavrilleux, at the material time chief of staff to the party's secretary general Jean-François Copé and deputy director of the presidential campaign team, admitted to having covered the system of double billing.
In May 2014, he helped reveal the scandal during an interview with BFMTV.
At the bar, however, he disputed having been the one who set up the “breakdown system” of electoral expenses.
This affair adds to other legal troubles for Nicolas Sarkozy.
He was sentenced in May 2023 on appeal in the wiretapping case to three years' imprisonment, one of which was fixed, a decision against which he appealed to the Court of Cassation.
He will also appear in 2025 on suspicion of Libyan financing of his 2007 presidential campaign. He was also indicted at the beginning of October in the aspect of this affair linked to the retraction of the intermediary Ziad Takieddine.