Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy lost his final bid to avoid going to trial on charges of corruption and influence peddling, said his lawyer on Wednesday. This is the first time in the history of modern France that a former leader will face explicit corruption charges in court.
Sarkozy stands accused of offering to help a judge win a promotion in Monaco in return for leaked information.
The Court of Cassation, which rules on questions of law, said that a trial was justified for Sakorzy, his lawyer Thierry Herzog as well as former judge Gilbert Azibert.
The trial is set to begin in the next months in Paris but doesn’t have a set date yet.
Sarkozy is not the first former president to be prosecuted, his predecessor Jacques Chirac was given a two-year suspended sentence in 2011 for embezzlement and misuse of public funds during his time as mayor of Paris.
The case arose after investigators tapped the phones of Sarkozy and Herzog to examine allegations that the former president had received millions of euros for his 2007 election campaign from the late Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.
What they began to suspect while listening on the phone calls is that Sarkozy had offered Azibert a promotion in return for information on developments in a parallel investigation into allegations Sarkozy accepted illicit payments from L’Oreal heiress Liliane Bettencourt for the same campaign.
The inquiry revealed that Sarkozy often communicated with Herzog with mobile phones obtained under fake names. Sarkozy is believed to have used the alias of Paul Bismuth.
The former president was cleared over the Bettencourt allegations in 2013 and claimed he should not face trial because Azibert never got the job in Monaco.
But investigators believe the deal fell through because Sarkozy and his lawyer learned that their phones were tapped.
Using a European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruling as a backup, Sarkozy’s defence lawyers argue that wiretapped transcriptions can be used only against lawyers and not their clients.
“It will be up to the court now to say if a French institution can free itself of a decision by the ECHR,” Sarkozy’s lawyer Jacqueline Laffont told AFP.
The former president was also charged over accusations that his 2007 election campaign was aided by millions of euros in money from Gaddafi.
Franco-Lebanese businessman Ziad Takieddine claimed to have transferred €5 million in a briefcase to Sarkozy’s campaign manager at the time.
