Sarkozy prepares for five-year prison term

A court on Thursday sentenced former French president Nicolas Sarkozy to five years in prison over a scheme for the late Libyan dictator Moamer Kadhafi to fund his 2007 presidential run, a verdict that will make the rightwinger the first French postwar leader to serve jail time.

The Paris criminal court convicted Sarkozy, 70 and president from 2007-2012, on charges of criminal conspiracy, although it acquitted him of corruption and personally accepting illegal campaign financing.

The court ordered that Sarkozy should be placed in custody at a later date, with prosecutors to inform the former head of state on October 13 when he should go to prison.

He was also fined 100,000 euros ($117,000) and banned from holding public office. He has been convicted already in two separate trials but always avoided jail, in one case serving his graft sentence with an electronic tag, which has since been removed.

Sarkozy, who was present in court for the verdict accompanied by his model and musician wife Carla Bruni-Sarkozy as well as his three sons, looked ashen-faced and shaken after the verdict.

But he vowed to appeal.

The verdict was "extremely serious for the rule of law", he told reporters after leaving the courtroom, adding that he would "sleep in prison with my head held high".

"This injustice is a scandal," he said. After her husband finished addressing reporters, Bruni-Sarkozy, in a sign of the family's anger, snatched away the microphone muffler of the Mediapart news website which had published the first revelations on the case.

Sarkozy's filing of an appeal has no effect on his obligation to go to prison. He is to be the first French leader to be incarcerated since Philippe Petain, the Nazi collaborationist head of state of France's Vichy regime, who was jailed after World War II.

'Exceptional gravity'

Prosecutors argued that Sarkozy and his aides devised a pact with Kadhafi in 2005 to illegally fund his victorious presidential election bid two years later.

Investigators believe that in return, Kadhafi was promised help to restore his international image after Tripoli was blamed by the West for bombing a plane in 1988 over Lockerbie, Scotland, and another over Niger in 1989, killing hundreds of passengers.

The presiding judge, Nathalie Gavarino, said the offences were of "exceptional gravity" and "likely to undermine the confidence of citizens".

The court's ruling, however, did not follow the conclusion of prosecutors that Sarkozy was the alleged beneficiary of the illegal campaign financing.