In an unprecedented ruling for a former French and European head of state, ex-French President Nicolas Sarkozy arrived Tuesday at La Santé Prison in Paris’s 14th arrondissement to begin serving his sentence over a Libyan funding scandal.
Sarkozy entered La Santé Prison to serve the five-year sentence after being convicted of conspiracy to gather illegal funds from Libya to finance his 2007 presidential campaign.
This makes Sarkozy, who served as president between 2007 and 2012, the first former French president to be incarcerated.
Hours before his incarceration in a solitary cell at La Santé, the former French leader reiterated his claim of innocence in posts across social media platforms.
Sarkozy departed his residence under heavy security escort en route to the prison. Approximately one hundred of his supporters had gathered outside his home in western Paris.
On September 25, judges issued an immediate committal order coinciding with his conviction for “criminal conspiracy,” bypassing the standard practice of awaiting the appeal trial scheduled for next summer.
The judges cited the “exceptional seriousness of the facts” to justify giving Sarkozy only a short window to arrange his affairs before entering prison.
Sarkozy was convicted for authorizing his closest aides at the time—Brice Hortefeux and Claude Guéant, then Minister of the Interior—to communicate with the late Libyan leader, Muammar Gaddafi, to secure illegal campaign funding.
In late 2005, Guéant and Hortefeux held meetings with the former head of Libyan intelligence, Abdullah Senussi who had been sentenced to life in absentia in France for his role in the 1989 bombing of the French UTA DC-10, which killed 170 people, including 54 French citizens.
Edited translation from Al-Masry Al-Youm
