(Paris) Retried for excessive spending on his lost 2012 presidential campaign, Nicolas Sarkozy, sentenced at first instance to one year in prison, “vigorously contested any criminal responsibility” on Friday, accusing a company of having enriched itself in his back.
“I vigorously contest any criminal liability, because I deny – and I hope to demonstrate – having ever had knowledge of fraud, having ever requested fraud or even having benefited from fraud,” declared the former President of the Republic (2007-2012) at the start of his interrogation, before the Paris Court of Appeal.
“If I didn’t ask, if I didn’t know, where is the intentional crime? », asked Mr Sarkozy at the bar, in a dark suit, saying a little later that he had been “a thousand miles from imagining that there was a system of false invoices”.
“I want the truth,” he continued, pugnacious in the face of the president’s questions.
Nicolas Sarkozy has been retried since November 8 alongside nine other people who appealed, partially or in full, their conviction in September 2021.
Unlike his co-defendants, he is not accused of the system of false invoices itself, designed to hide the explosion in his campaign’s expenses (nearly 43 million euros, while the legal ceiling was 22.5 million). But he was sentenced at first instance to one year’s imprisonment for having exceeded this legal limit.
The criminal court had underlined in its judgment that the former president had “continued the organization of” electoral rallies, “requesting one gathering per day”, even though he “had been warned in writing” of the risk of legal excess, then the actual overrun.
He denounced “the lie of a campaign that is going crazy”. “This is the only explanation that the defendants have found to explain the flood of money in their company and in their pockets,” said Mr. Sarkozy.
Pugnacious in the face of the president’s questions, the former head of state did not sometimes mask his annoyance, as when he claimed to have held as many rallies in 2012 as during his victorious 2007 campaign.
This case adds to other legal troubles for Nicolas Sarkozy: he was sentenced last May in a wiretapping case to three years’ imprisonment, one of which was suspended, a decision against which he appealed to the Court of Cassation.
The former head of state will appear in 2025 on suspicion of Libyan financing of his victorious 2007 presidential campaign. He was also indicted, at the beginning of October, in the aspect of this case linked to the retraction of the intermediary Ziad Takieddine.