The French former president Nicolás Sarkozy has received a hard penalty request from the financial prosecutor, who investigates the Libyan financing of his electoral campaign.
It was 4:45 in the afternoon of Thursday when the representative of the National Financial Attorney (PNF), after almost 24 hours of a three -band process that began on Tuesday, requested a penalty never contemplated for a former president of the Republic. Should be sentenced to 7 years in prison, 300,000 euros of fine and 5 years of disqualification.
Sitting in front of him, Sarkozy received the blow. A few minutes later, he left the courtroom smiling as a great actor, shaking some hands in his path, and disappeared in the halls of the Paris Court. His car was waiting for him on Rue Du Bastion Street.
Harsh feathers
The National Financial Prosecutor’s Office It has been hard with all the defendants, Many of whom faced 10 years in prison.
Thus asked the prosecutor for three years for former Interior Minister Brice Hortefeux and his friend, Thierry Gaubert. Another five years for the “corruption agent” Alexandre Djouhri, 6 for his fugitive alter ego, the Lebanese Ziad Takieddine, and the same number for former Libyan dignitary Bashir Saleh, also a fugitive.
For Eric Woerth, former Minister of Economy, the maximum penalty is requested (1 year for illegal financing of the 2007 campaign).
Prison sentences will be accompanied by fines of up to 3 million euros for Takieddine, 4 million for Djouhri and 6 million for Saleh.
The PNF justifies its severity revealing, according to him, “a very dark image of a part of our republic.”
Regarding Sarkozy, the prosecutor stigmatizes His “frantic search for financing for his excessive ambitions”. He denounces a “pact of fake corruption with one of the most discredited dictators, whose murderous madness” caused the death of hundreds of people, including 54 French citizens, in the 1989 attack against a DC 10 of the UTA.
The trial is not over. As of Monday, lDefense will have the word To respond to prosecutors. The lawyers of the former head of state – continue who there is no requested arrest warrant – will speak on April 8, after which the trial will be reserved for several months.
The processing car does not link the three judges, including the president of the court, Nathalie Gavarino: they can follow or resolve other penalties or even pronounce absolute sentences.
Devastating arguments
The prosecutor’s argument was devastating.
He was especially supported by Libyan witnesses, in the notebooks of a former head of the Jamahiriya, Choukri Ghanem, in countless data from the Ziad Takieddine hard drive, much more solid than his words, also reinforced by the mediocre credibility of a large part of the statements of the accused, the three prosecutors have built a formidable accusation.
Financial Prosecutor Sébastien de la Touanne demanded that the defendants in the process be accused of “Libyan Financing”. Nicolas Sarkozy saw the wave grow and approach. When the magistrate asked for a six -year prison sentence, a fine of 100,000 euros and five years of disqualification for former Interior Minister Claude Guéant, knew that for him the penalty would be even longer.
Although no bags with Libyan money were found, money from Tripoli was identified, through a secret account, belonging to Ziad Takieddine: 440,000 euros, received in an exotic account belonging to Gaubert. In addition, the crime of corruption is constituted by the existence of a pact, not by the tracking of sums that by nature are hidden
To the Defense by Sarkozy
Nicolas Sarkozy, as the first day and as if eleven weeks of audiences had not passed, said in X that «the PNF has persisted for 13 years in trying to demonstrate my guilt, basic ideological postulate. Therefore, I will continue fighting with nails and teeth and believing in the wisdom of the court.
In the end, the falsehood and violence of the accusations and the excess of the requested penalty persists, which only seek to mask the weakness of the alleged positions. Finally, I want to say emphatically that who is the victim of an injustice is less worthy of pity than who commits it.
The first defends the truth. The second mockery. Before the History Court, the place reserved for the latter is not the most enviable. I leave it to my accusers, ”he wrote on the social network.
Although the National Financial Prosecutor’s Office has requested for him a seven -year prison sentence, the former head of State considers that “the fundamental principles of law” have been “violated for 13 years.”
During the summary initiated on March 25, prosecutor Philippe Jaeglé defended himself from these accusations. “The governing principle of PNF is the application of the law with justice and impartiality, without presumption of guilt,” he said in the preamble, before denouncing “an inconceivable, unaudible and indecent corruption pact.”
His colleague, prosecutor Quentin, had talked about a “set of evidence” that pointed Nicolas Sarkozy, qualified as the “sponsor” of this operation.
And the magistrate evoked “the silhouette of a man moved by a devouring personal ambition, willing to sacrifice at the altar of power the essential values of probity, honesty and righteousness that, however, had to embody given the greatness of the functions to which he aspired and that he reached.”
Nicolas Sarkozy, already definitely sentenced to three years in prison, one of them in prison, in the case of telephone listeners in mid -December, must first face the next decision of the Paris Criminal Court within a few months.