The former French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, will go to prison on Tuesday after a court sentenced him to five years for criminal conspiracy over a scheme to obtain election campaign funds from the regime of the late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi.
Sarkozy, who was the rightwing president of France between 2007 and 2012, will become the first former head of an EU country to serve time in prison, and the first French postwar leader to be jailed.
“I’m not afraid of prison. I’ll keep my head held high, including at the prison gates,” Sarkozy told La Tribune de Dimanche. He has been ordered to present himself at the gates of La Santé prison in the south of Paris early on Tuesday morning. He said he had asked for “no privileges” in his treatment behind bars.
Sarkozy, 70, told Le Figaro that he had packed family photos and three books, as permitted for the first week. “I’m bringing The Count of Monte Cristo and two volumes of the biography of Jesus by Jean-Christian Petitfils,” he said.
He is expected to be held in solitary confinement for his own security, in an individual cell of about 9 metres squared. He will have no mobile phone, but will have a small television. A security-controlled phoneline will allow him contact with his lawyers and family. He is expected to have the right to two visits a week from family. He told Le Figaro that he’d been advised to take earplugs. “At night you hear lots of noise, shouting, screaming,” he said.
Sarkozy will be able to leave his cell for one hour a day, to walk in an interior courtyard, with the opening to the sky protected by wire mesh. Three prison guards will accompany him when he leaves his cell.
“My life is a novel and this ordeal is now part of it,” Sarkozy told Le Figaro. He said: “They wanted to make me disappear but this will make me be reborn.”
La Santé prison has held some of Frances’s most famous prisoners in its 158-year history, including the terrorist Carlos the Jackal and the war criminal Maurice Papon.
Sarkozy’s son, Louis, who is preparing to run for mayor in Menton on the French Riviera next spring, urged supporters to stand near Sarkozy’s home in the 16th arrondissement of Paris to cheer him off as he is driven to prison on Tuesday.
Sarkozy was found guilty last month of criminal conspiracy over a scheme to seek funding from the regime of Gaddafi for his victorious 2007 French presidential election campaign.
The lead judge, Nathalie Gavarino, justified the five-year prison sentence by saying the facts of the case were of an “exceptional gravity” and “likely to undermine citizens’ trust”.
During the trial, the public prosecutor had told the court that Sarkozy entered into a “Faustian pact of corruption with one of the most unspeakable dictators of the last 30 years” to gain election funding from Gaddafi.
Sarkozy was acquitted of three separate charges of corruption, misuse of Libyan public funds and illegal election campaign funding.
At his trial, Sarkozy denied wrongdoing and said he was not part of a criminal conspiracy to seek election funding from Libya. He has appealed against his conviction. A new trial is expected in about six months. But the nature of Sarkozy’s prison sentence means he must go to jail as his appeal process plays out.
The former president’s lawyers are expected to formally ask for his release as soon as he arrives at the prison, and a court will have two months to examine the request. The court could order Sarkozy’s release under judicial supervision or home arrest with an ankle tag. It could also decide against letting him out of prison if, for example, it deems it the only way to prevent evidence tampering or witness intimidation.
Although the allegations of a secret campaign funding pact with the Libyan regime formed the biggest corruption trial Sarkozy had faced, he had already been convicted in two separate cases and stripped of France’s highest distinction, the Legion of Honour.
Sarkozy had previously become the first former French head of state forced to wear an electronic tag after being convicted in a separate case of corruption and influence peddling over illegal attempts to secure favours from a judge. In that case, he was given a one year jail term but was able to serve it with an electronic tag worn around the ankle. He wore the tag for three months before being granted conditional release.
The presiding judge in the criminal conspiracy trial received death threats from unknown people after the verdict last month, prompting President Emmanuel Macron to publicly call out such attacks as “unacceptable”.
