Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy has been sentenced to five years in prison for a campaign finance violation:
Nicolas Sarkozy has been jailed for five years for conspiring to finance his 2007 presidential campaign using funds from Muammar Gaddafi, the late Libyan dictator.
Prosecutors said Sarkozy, 70, who led the country from 2007 to 2012, made a “corruption pact” with the Libyan state for millions of euros in exchange for diplomatic favours to help Gaddafi combat his pariah reputation in the West.
Finding him guilty of criminal conspiracy, the court in Paris sentenced him to five years in prison on Thursday, making him the first former French president in history to be jailed.
As I understand it, the court found that Sarkozy conspired to get money from Gaddafi in exchange for political support, but didn’t actually do so:
Sarkozy was acquitted of all other charges, including corruption and illegal campaign financing, with the court saying there was not enough evidence that he received illegal campaign financing, or that Libyan funds were used in his 2007 campaign.
It is a strange story. I know nothing about French campaign finance laws, but it is hard to imagine that the best way to finance a presidential campaign would be by selling favors to Muammar Gaddafi. Or, as the court fond here, conspiring to do so.
Sarkozy insists that he is innocent. I don’t know whether he is or not, but the business of jailing former political leaders is dangerous. Unless the case is very strong, it carries a whiff of the banana republic. We are sensitive to this because the Democrats tried to jail Donald Trump after he completed his first term on the flimsiest grounds imaginable–basically, as punishment for winning the 2016 election. So, without having any particular insight into the facts, my instinct is to be sympathetic to Sarkozy.
