PARIS: 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’s 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’s highest court.

“Mr Nicolas Sarkozy is fully innocent. He has taken note of this decision and he has decided to appeal to the Court of Cassation,” he told reporters. “He therefore maintains his fight, his position in this matter,” he added.

In the so-called “Bygmalion affair”, 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’s 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 — one of 10 of the 13 defendants to do so — 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 “vigorously” denied any wrongdoing, accusing the firm, Bygmalion, of having enriched itself behind his back.

Published in Dawn, February 15th, 2024