2 hours ago
1
The former French president Nicolas Sarkozy has said his time in prison has been “gruelling” and a “nightmare” as he appeared via video link at a court hearing over his request to serve his sentence at home.
Sarkozy, dressed in a navy blue suit, appeared on camera from prison on Monday, 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.”
Sarkozy entered La Santé prison in Paris on 21 October, after being handed a five-year jail sentence for criminal conspiracy over a scheme to obtain funds for his 2007 presidential election campaign from the regime of the late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi.
He has appealed against the verdict, but judges ruled that because of the “exceptional gravity” of his conviction, he had to go to prison while the appeals process took its course.
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.
Sarkozy told the court from prison: “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.”
He said he would not attempt to enter into contact with any defendants or witnesses in the case. He said: “I’m French, I love my country, my family is in France. This ordeal has made them suffer a lot.”
Sarkozy’s lawyer Jean-Michel Darrois, sitting next to him in the prison video link room, said: “Being in isolation has been very hard for him.” He said of Sarkozy: “He’s a strong, robust and courageous man and this detention has caused him great suffering.”
In court, another of Sarkozy’s lawyers, Christophe Ingrain, who had visited him every day, said Sarkozy would be safer out of prison than inside. “He has faced death threats, has heard screaming at night and the urgent intervention in a neighbouring cell when a prisoner self-harmed,” he said.
The state prosecutor Damien Brunet asked that Sarkozy’s request for release be granted. The court will announce its decision on Monday afternoon.
When he entered prison three weeks ago, Sarkozy organised a highly stage-managed departure from his home in the west of the capital, where he walked with his wife, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, to greet dozens of supporters in the street outside. Bruni-Sarkozy was in court for the release request hearing on Monday morning, along with Sarkozy’s two oldest sons.
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 yoghurt in prison as he feared any food might have been spat on. He had been offered the 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, including a collage, a chocolate bar and a book. “No letter will go unanswered,” his account announced. “The end of the story has not yet been written.”
after newsletter promotion
Sarkozy took into prison a biography of Jesus as well as The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas’s novel in which an innocent man is sentenced to jail but escapes to take revenge.
During Sarkozy’s three-month 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”.
Sarkozy denied wrongdoing and said he had not been 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 also appealed against these acquittals, Sarkozy will be re-tried 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.
