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    Wiretapping affair: Sarkozy indicted for corruption and influence trafficking

  • Funding from Libya for the election campaign: Sarkozy under investigation in France, he denies everything

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19 June 2019 Still legal troubles for Nicolas Sarkozy.

After the rejection of the latest appeals by the justice, the former French president will be tried for corruption and trafficking of influences.

It is the first time since the beginning of the Fifth Republic in 1958 that a former president has been tried for such a crime.



And therefore, at the age of 64, the former French president experiences his retirement from politics under judicial pressure.

Sarkozy will have to answer for the corruption charge of a high judge of the Court of Cassation, Gilbert Azibert, a case revealed by wiretapping.



The accusation is that he attempted in early 2014, through his lawyer Thierry Herzog, to obtain secret information from Azibert as part of a proceeding concerning the seizure of his agendas in the 'Bettencourt affair' - the alleged illegal payments from part of Liliane Bettencourt, the billionaire heiress of L'Oreal, to members of the government linked to Sarkozy - in exchange for a recommendation to the judge for a prestigious position in Monaco.

The investigators had checked Sarkozy's phone because they suspected that he could have received funding from the Libyan regime of Moammar Gaddafi during the campaign that in 2007 had brought him to the Elysée: from the interceptions between the former president and his lawyer they discovered that the two were trying to obtain, through Azibert, confidential information on the investigation into whether Liliane Bettencourt had illegally financed her electoral campaign. 



Some of these conversations, published in the press, hinted that Sarkozy was willing to help the judge get a position in Munich in exchange for a Supreme Court decision in his favor in the Bettencourt case.



In March 2016, the justice system definitively validated almost all of the interceptions on which his indictment is based, which paved the way for the trial.

And all the appeals he had filed since October 2018 have been rejected.



Sarkozy is also awaiting another trial for the allegedly irregular funding of his campaign in the 2012 presidential elections. It is the so-called 'Bygmalion case', an alleged plot of fake invoices to hide the accounts and evade the electoral spending limits (according to the prosecution, he would have spent at least 42.8 million euros compared to the 22.5 million authorized).

His former right-hand man at the Elysée, Claude Gueant and former campaign treasurer, Eric Woerth, are also indicted in the trial.