The former French president Nicolas Sarkozy is to be released from prison after a judge ruled he could serve the rest of his sentence at home.
Sarkozy had told the court his three weeks in prison had been “gruelling” and a “nightmare” as he appeared by video link from prison.
Sarkozy entered Paris’s La Santé prison on 21 October, after a Paris court gave him a five-year sentence for criminal conspiracy over a scheme to obtain election campaign funds for his 2007 presidential race from the regime of the late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi.
He denies wrongdoing and has appealed against that verdict, with a fresh trial on appeal scheduled for next spring. Judges ruled last month that because of the “exceptional gravity” of his conviction, he must go to prison while the appeals process took its course.
A Paris appeal court on Monday granted Sarkozy’s request for release to serve his sentence at home with strict judicial controls.
At a hearing on Monday, Sarkozy, dressed in a navy blue suit, appeared on camera from prison, seated at a table with his lawyers beside him. He told the court: “I want to pay tribute to all the prison staff, who are exceptionally humane, and who have made this nightmare bearable – because it is a nightmare.”
He said: “I never had any idea or intention to ask Mr Gaddafi for any kind of financing … I will never confess to something I didn’t do … I never imagined that at 70 years of age, I’d be in prison. It’s an ordeal that has been imposed on me. I confess it’s hard, it’s very hard. It leaves a mark on any prisoner because it’s gruelling.”
Sarkozy has been held in solitary confinement for his own security, in an individual cell of about 9 sq metres with his own shower and toilet. Two bodyguards are occupying a neighbouring cell to ensure his safety. The French news weekly Le Point reported that he had been eating only yoghurts in prison as he feared any food might have been spat on. He had facilities to cook for himself but refused this, the magazine reported, citing unnamed sources.
Sarkozy’s social media account last week posted a video of piles of letters, postcards and packages it said had been sent to him, some including a collage, a chocolate bar or a book. “No letter will go unanswered,” his account announced. “The end of the story has not yet been written.”
Sarkozy, who served as France’s rightwing president between 2007 and 2012, is the first former head of an EU country to serve time in prison, and the first French postwar leader to go behind bars.
During his three-month trial, the public prosecutor 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 denied wrongdoing and said he was not part of a criminal conspiracy to seek election funding from Libya.
He was acquitted of three separate charges of corruption, misuse of Libyan public funds and illegal election campaign funding. After the state prosecutor appealed against the acquittals, Sarkozy will be retried on all the charges next year, including criminal conspiracy.
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 Légion d’honneur.
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.
