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The former French president Nicolas Sarkozy was fitted with an electronic tag on Friday after losing his appeal against his conviction for corruption and influence peddling.
He will be required to remain at his Paris home between 8pm and 8am, but has been given a special dispensation to be outside until 9.30pm for three days a week when attending a separate trial on charges – that he denies – of accepting millions in illegal campaign funds from the Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi.
If he fails to keep the legally imposed hours of house arrest, an alarm will alert the authorities.
Sarkozy, who once threatened to clean louts, delinquents and “rabble” from the streets using a pressure washer, was found guilty in 2021 of trying to bribe a judge in 2014 after he had left office.
He was sentenced to three years in jail, two years suspended, and told he would be allowed to serve the third under electronic monitoring to avoid prison. His appeal against this judgment was rejected by France’s highest court in December, leading to the fitting of the electronic tag at his home on Friday.
Sarkozy, who has been forced to cancel all evening and foreign engagements, has said he will make a final appeal to the European court of human rights, but this does not delay the verdict from being carried out. If he wishes to go abroad during the next 12 months he will have to ask for authorisation from the court.
It is the first time a former president has been electronically tagged. Sarkozy, who led France between 2007 and 2012, is also on trial over allegations he received millions of euros in illegal campaign funding from Gaddafi. The trial follows a 10-year anti-corruption investigation.
His predecessor, Jacques Chirac, who died in 2019, was given a two-year suspended sentence in 2011 for having overseen a fake jobs scam at Paris city hall when he was mayor.
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On Friday, Sarkozy’s lawyer Jacqueline Laffont told AFP: “The [legal] procedure is following its course. I have no comment to make.”
