The former conservative leader is accused of taking millions of euros from Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi to finance his 2007 election campaign.

By Victor Goury-Laffont

PARIS — Prosecutors on Thursday requested that former French President Nicolas Sarkozy be sentenced to seven years in prison for allegedly accepting money from the late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi to fund his first presidential campaign.

In their recommendations the prosecutors accused Sarkozy and some of his former associates — including former interior ministers Claude Guéant and Brice Hortefeux, as well as former Budget Minister Eric Woerth, now an MP for President Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance party — of having reached an “unconceivable, unprecedented, indecent” agreement with Gaddafi.

Prosecutors requested that Guéant be sentenced to six years in prison, Hortefeux to three and Woerth to one.

The alleged agreement involved Gaddafi’s pouring millions of euros into Sarkozy’s 2007 presidential campaign, his first and only successful run for the office.

In exchange for the financial support, Sarkozy allegedly agreed to use his presidential powers to strengthen France’s diplomatic and business ties with Tripoli, and to reexamine the case of Gaddafi’s brother-in-law Abdullah Senussi. In 1999 Senussi was found guilty in absentia by a French court of having played a role in the bombing of a flight heading from Brazzaville in the then-People’s Republic of the Congo to Paris — in which all 170 passengers were killed — and was sentenced to life in prison.

French financial investigators spent a decade investigating claims that Sarkozy’s campaign received Libyan funding, which were first put forward by the investigative news outlet Mediapart in 2012.

Sarkozy has repeatedly professed his innocence and claimed to be the victim of a conspiracy tied to the French-led NATO effort to overthrow Gaddafi in 2011 while he was president. After the prosecution made its recommendations the former right-wing president put out a statement saying he would “continue to fight … for truth, and to believe in the court’s wisdom.”

The 70-year-old is already serving a one-year prison sentence under house arrest after being found guilty of corruption.

Source: Politico.eu