(25 Sep 2025)
RESTRICTION SUMMARY:
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Paris – 25 September 2025
1. Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy arriving alongside his wife, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy and entering courtroom
2. Another accused former minister Brice Hortefeux arrives
3. Former French interior minister Claude Gueant arrives
4. Security
STORYLINE:
Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy arrived in court Thursday morning to hear a verdict in which he faces up to 10 years in prison if a Paris court convicts him of secretly using funds from the Libyan government of late dictator Moammar Gadhafi to finance his presidential campaign in 2007.
The verdict is expected on Thursday.
If convicted, the 70-year-old Sarkozy would be the first former French president found guilty of accepting illegal foreign funds to win office.
Sarkozy, who was elected in 2007 but lost his bid for reelection in 2012, has denied all wrongdoing during a three-month trial earlier this year that also involved 11 co-defendants, including three former ministers.
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 singer and model Carla Bruni-Sarkozy.
Sarkozy can appeal a guilty verdict, which would suspend the sentence pending the appeal.
Prosecutors have argued for a seven-year prison sentence.
The accusations trace their roots to 2011, when a Libyan news agency and Gadhafi himself said that the Libyan state had secretly funneled 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.
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 Gadhafi’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 Gadhafi was seeking to restore diplomatic ties with the West.
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