PARIS: France’s top court on Wednesday upheld Nicolas Sarkozy’s conviction for illegal campaign financing of his 2012 reelection bid, in another blow to the former president’s legacy and reputation.
The decision by the Court of Cassation makes definitive Sarkozy’s conviction to a year in prison, half of it suspended, for fraudulently overspending on the failed campaign.
Under French law the sentence can be served at home, monitored with an electronic bracelet or other requirements set by a judge.
The decision comes just two weeks after Sarkozy’s release from prison pending an appeal in another campaign financing case. Sarkozy, 70, was incarcerated for 20 days in Paris’ La Santé prison, after judges convicted him of scheming to get secret financing from Libya in his winning campaign for the French presidency in 2007. He has denied any wrongdoing.
Here’s what to know about Wednesday’s decision and other legal proceedings involving Sarkozy.
Ruling’s meaning
A Paris court in 2021 and an appeals court in 2024 convicted Sarkozy of illegal campaign financing in 2012. He’s accused of having spent almost twice the maximum legal amount of 22.5 million euros ($25.5 million) on the reelection bid that he lost to François Hollande, a socialist.
Sarkozy’s conviction is now considered definitive by French law, with no further appeal possible.
France’s top court isn’t reexamining the entire case, but instead is verifying that the law and proceedings’ rules were properly applied.
The Court of Cassation said in a statement Wednesday that it “upholds the appeals’ court decision convicting a presidential candidate, his campaign manager and two directors of the political party supporting him for illegal campaign financing.”
Libya case
Sarkozy’s appeal trial in the Libya case is scheduled to run from March 16 to June 3.
In September, a Paris court found him guilty of criminal association in a plot from 2005 to 2007, when he served as interior minister, to finance his winning presidential campaign with funds from Libya in exchange for diplomatic favors. It sentenced him to five years in prison.
Sarkozy was cleared of three other charges, including passive corruption, illegal campaign financing and concealing the embezzlement of public funds.
The court found that two of Sarkozy’s closest associates held secret meetings in 2005 with Abdullah Al-Senoussi, the brother-in-law and intelligence chief of longtime Libyan ruler Muammar Qaddafi.
Qaddafi was toppled and killed in an uprising in 2011, ending his four-decade rule of the North African country. Al-Senoussi is considered the mastermind of attacks on a Pan Am jumbo jet over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988 and a French airliner over Niger the following year — causing hundreds of deaths. In 2003, Libya took responsibility for both plane bombings.
Prison memoir
Sarkozy is publishing a book on Dec. 10 about his recent time behind bars, titled “Diary of a Prisoner.”
He described prison as “a nightmare.”
“I had never imagined I would experience prison at 70. This ordeal was imposed on me, and I lived through it. It’s hard, very hard,” Sarkozy said during a court hearing on his release.
In a post on X, he said that “the noise is, unfortunately, constant” and that “the inner life of man becomes stronger in prison.”
Witness tampering
French investigative judges filed preliminary charges in 2023 against Sarkozy for his alleged involvement in a possible attempt to clear him in the Libya financing case by pressuring a witness.
In 2016, French-Lebanese businessman Ziad Takieddine said that he had delivered suitcases filled with cash from Tripoli to France’s Interior Ministry under Sarkozy. He later retracted his statement.
Financial prosecutors said that Sarkozy is suspected of “benefiting from corruptly influencing a witness,” in reference to Takieddine.
Sarkozy’s wife, former supermodel Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, was given preliminary charges in July 2024 for alleged involvement in efforts to pressure Takieddine. Bruni-Sarkozy was placed under judicial supervision, which includes a ban on contact with all those involved in the proceedings except for her husband.
Investigative magistrates still have to decide whether they send the couple to trial on these charges.
Takieddine died in September in Beirut.
Previous conviction
Sarkozy’s criminal records already register a definitive conviction for corruption and influence peddling while he was the country’s head of state.
Last year, the Court of Cassation upheld an appeals court decision that had found Sarkozy guilty of trying to bribe a magistrate in exchange for information about legal proceedings in which he was involved. The case was revealed through wiretapped phone conversations during the Libya financing investigation.
Sarkozy was sentenced to a year in prison, but he was entitled to be detained at home with an electronic bracelet. He was granted conditional release in May because of his age, which allowed him to remove the electronic tag after just over three months.
He was stripped of his Legion of Honor medal, France’s highest distinction, following his conviction in that case.
France’s top court upholds Sarkozy’s conviction for illegal campaign financing in 2012
https://arab.news/rvqa8
France’s top court upholds Sarkozy’s conviction for illegal campaign financing in 2012
- The decision makes definitive Sarkozy’s conviction to a year in prison, half of it suspended, for fraudulently overspending on the failed campaign
- Under French law the sentence can be served at home, monitored with an electronic bracelet or other requirements set by a judge
How a Syrian refugee chef met Britain’s King Charles
- Alarnab, 48, said he had asked the king to come to the popular eatery when he met him at Buckingham Palace
LONDON: Pots clanged and oil sizzled inside the London kitchen of Syrian chef Imad Alarnab, as the former refugee who fled his country’s civil war recalled hosting King Charles III.
When the chef left his war-torn homeland in 2015, he never imagined that one day he would watch as cameras flashed and wide-eyed crowds greeted the monarch arriving at his Soho restaurant last year.
Alarnab, 48, said he had asked the king to come to the popular eatery when he met him at Buckingham Palace before an event honoring humanitarian work in 2023.
“I told him ‘I would love for you to visit our restaurant one day’ and he said: ‘I would love to’... I was over the Moon to be honest.”
The chef has come a long way since he arrived in London after an arduous journey from Damascus with virtually no money in his pocket.
Fearing for his life, he had escaped Syria after his family was uprooted again and again by fighting.
His culinary empire — restaurants, cafes, and juice bars peppered across the Syrian capital — had been destroyed by bombing in just six days in 2013.
Alarnab spent three months crisscrossing Europe in the back of lorries, aboard trains, on foot and even on a bicycle before he reached the UK.
“When I left, I left with nothing,” he told AFP, as waiters whirled past carrying steaming plates of traditional Syrian fare.
Starving and exhausted, he spent the last of his money on a train ticket to Doncaster where his sister lived.
“Love letter from Syria”
To make a living, Alarnab initially picked up any odd jobs, such as washing and selling cars, saving enough to bring his wife and three daughters over after seven months.
His love of cooking never left him though. In France, while he was sleeping on the steps of a church, Alarnab had often cooked for hundreds of other refugees.
“I always dreamed of going back to cooking,” he said.
So it wasn’t long before he found himself back in the kitchen, cooking up a storm across London with his sold-out supper clubs, bustling pop-up cafes, and crowded lunchtime falafel bars.
Alarnab’s friends gave him the initial boost for his first pop-up in 2017, and profits from his new catering business then covered the costs of later events.
He now runs two restaurants in the city — one in Soho’s buzzing Kingly Court and another nestled in a corner of the vibrant Somerset House arts center.
“I was looking for a city to love when I found London,” Alarnab said, adding it had offered him “space to innovate” and add his own modern twist to classic Syrian dishes.
Far from home, Alarnab said his word-of-mouth success had grown into a “love letter from Syria to the world” that needs no translation.
“You don’t really need to speak Arabic or Syrian to know that this is the best falafel ever,” he said, pointing to a row of colorful plates.
“There is hope”
For Alarnab, spices frying, dough rising and cheese melting inside a kitchen offered an unlikely escape from the real world.
“All my problems, I leave them outside the kitchen and walk in fresh.”
When he fled Syria, Alarnab thought going back to Damascus was forever off the table.
Yet he returned for the first time in October, almost a year to the day after longtime leader Bashar Assad was toppled in a lightning rebel offensive — ending almost 14 years of brutal civil war.
He walked the familiar streets of his old home, where his late mother taught him to cook many years ago.
“To return to Damascus and for her not to be there, that was extremely difficult.”
Torn between the two cities, Alarnab said he longed to one day rebuild his home in Damascus.
“I wish I could go back and live there. But at the same time, I feel like London is now a part of me. I don’t know if I could ever go back and just be in Syria,” he said.
Although Syrians still bear the scars of war, Alarnab said he had seen “hope in people’s eyes which was missing when I left in 2015.”
“The road ahead is still very long, and yes this is only the beginning — but there is hope.”
