An appeals court on Wednesday confirmed a conviction for former French president Nicolas Sarkozy over illegal campaign financing, but lightened his original one-year prison sentence. The court said he should serve six months, with another six months suspended. The ruling was still harsher than the one-year suspended sentence that prosecutors had called for. It remains unlikely he would ever go to prison, with such short terms in France usually being served as a form of house arrest. The Paris court of appeal was confirming a lower court\u2019s guilty verdict for Sarkozy, who was convicted of hiding illegal overspending in his unsuccessful 2012 re-election campaign. His lawyer Vincent Desry immediately said the combative ex-president would challenge the appeal verdict at France\u2019s highest court. \u201cMr Nicolas Sarkozy is fully innocent. He has taken note of this decision and he has decided to appeal to the Court of Cassation,\u201d he told reporters. \u201cHe therefore maintains his fight, his position in this matter,\u201d he added. In the so-called \u201cBygmalion affair\u201d, Sarkozy, 69, faced charges that his right-wing party, then known as the UMP, worked with a public relations firm to hide the true cost of his 2012 re-election bid. When the court handed down its one-year jail term in 2021, he became France\u2019s first post-World War II president to be sentenced to prison. But the court specified that the sentence should take the form of electronically controlled house arrest rather than prison. After Sarkozy appealed that sentence \u2014 one of 10 of the 13 defendants to do so \u2014 the appeal trial began in November last year. He has not so far served any jail time as his case has been winding its way through appeals. The former French president has \u201cvigorously\u201d denied any wrongdoing, accusing the firm, Bygmalion, of having enriched itself behind his back.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
An appeals court on Wednesday confirmed a conviction for former French president Nicolas Sarkozy over illegal campaign financing, but lightened his original one-year prison sentence….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":14374,"comment_status":"registered_only","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14373","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14373","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14373"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14373\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/14374"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14373"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14373"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14373"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}