Last resort exhausted. The former President of the Republic, Nicolas Sarkozy, will be definitively returned to the criminal court in the context of the Bygmalion case after the Court of Cassation rejected, Tuesday, October 1, the last appeal of the former head of the state, according to a judgment consulted by AFP.

Nicolas Sarkozy is being prosecuted for "illegal financing of electoral campaign" for the excessive expenses of his 2012 presidential campaign. It is an offense punishable by one year in prison and a fine of 3,750 euros, ordered in February 2017 by the examining magistrate Serge Tournaire.

Thirteen other protagonists will be judged in this case. In addition to the appeal of the former head of state, the Court of Cassation dismissed the appeals of seven other defendants against the judgment of the investigating chamber of October 25, 2018 which had confirmed their referral to correction.

Election expenses of more than 20 million euros

In its judgment, the Court of Cassation considers that it is not up to him, at this stage, to pronounce on the complaints of Nicolas Sarkozy and that it is the correctional court to examine them.

"This is a disappointment because the proposed criticism was likely to be welcomed, but in reality the Court of Cassation did not respond and leave it to the court to do so," reacted to AFP Me Emmanuel Piwnica, lawyer Nicolas Sarkozy.

"Once again, President Sarkozy is not concerned with the facts about Bygmalion, but only about exceeding the spending ceiling," he said.

Nicolas Sarkozy is being prosecuted for having exceeded the threshold of election expenses of more than 20 million euros, despite the alerts of the accountants of the campaign in March and April 2012.

To challenge his dismissal, he had brandished the principle of "non bis in idem", according to which a person can not be punished twice for the same facts. Nicolas Sarkozy believes to have already been sanctioned definitively by the Constitutional Council in 2013, when the body confirmed the rejection of his accounts for this overrun, which he had had to repay.

However, this sanction involved a slippage of 363,615 euros, found before the revelation in spring 2014 of a large system of false invoices to disguise the runaway expenses of its meetings, organized by the Bygmalion agency.

With AFP