Сourt put "Putin's friend" Sarkozy under one-year house arrest

Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy will spend a year under house arrest. The verdict in wiretapping case was upheld by the Paris Court of Appeals.

France24 reported about this.

He will serve the sentence at home by wearing an electronic monitoring bracelet instead of going to prison. The politician was also sentenced with two years suspended.

Sarkozy was originally sentenced in March 2021 in Paris. He was found guilty of corruption and influence peddling, and sentenced to three years in prison, with two years suspended.

Sarkozy's lawyer, Thierry Herzog, and former high-ranking employee of the Court of Cassation, Gilbert Azibert, were also found guilty of corruption.

According to investigators, Sarkozy promised to help Azibert in obtaining a position in the Principality of Monaco in exchange for confidential information about the investigation into illegal financing of his election campaign by French company L'Oréal.

Investigators had wiretapped the politician's phone conversations since 2013.

The contents of these phone calls led to the 2021 corruption verdict. Sarkozy contested the accusations and immediately appealed against his conviction.

On the first day of the appeals hearing in December last year, he said he had "never corrupted anybody".

His conversations with Herzog have now been played in court for the first time and were central in determining Wednesday's ruling.

The prosecutor's office had requested that Sarkozy, Herzog and Azibert each be handed a three-year suspended sentence.

They had also asked for Sarkozy and Azibert to be suspended from public office and Herzog to be banned from practising law, each for five years.

Sarkozy was President of France from 2007 to 2012.

He called himself a friend of Russian President Vladimir Putin. The French leader claimed that the prestige of Russia has seriously increased unexpectedly for the Russians themselves.

"You cannot even imagine how great is your prestige and how your image has changed on the global stage. Russia has again become a powerful nation, Russia knows its place on the international arena and knows its fate," he stressed.

President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy has invited Merkel and Sarkozy to visit Bucha and see what the 14-year policy of concessions to Russia has led to.