PARIS: Nicolas Sarkozy was fitted with an electronic tag Friday after being convicted of graft, prosecutors said, in a first for a former French president.
France’s highest appeals court in December ordered Sarkozy to wear the tag for a year, after finding him guilty of illegal attempts to secure favours from a judge.
Sarkozy, who turned 70 last week, was fitted with the ankle monitor at his home, the Paris prosecutor’s office said.
A judge summoned the ex-president on the day of his birthday and told him he would wear the monitor from February 7, a source close to the case said. The ankle bracelet was imposed as an alternative to spending one year in jail.
The right-wing politician, who was president from 2007 to 2012, would only be allowed out of his home between 8.00 am and 8.00 pm, the prosecutor’s office said.
He would however be allowed an extra hour and a half in the evenings three days a week when he attends court as an accused in another case.
In hearings that started last month and run through to April 10, Sarkozy has been charged with accepting illegal campaign financing from Libya before his 2007 election.
Sarkozy’s lawyer Jacqueline Laffont said he continued to contest the conviction for influence peddling and would lodge an application with the European Court of Human Rights this month, after exhausting all legal avenues in France.
Theoretically, the former head-of-state could also apply in France for a conditional release that can be given to people aged 70 and above.
– No travel –
Sarkozy has been shadowed by legal troubles since he lost the 2012 presidential election.
But he remains an influential figure and is known to regularly meet President Emmanuel Macron.
Before the latest trial, Sarkozy, his wife singer and former supermodel Carla Bruni and daughter went on holiday to the Seychelles. He is no longer able to travel.
In the case which led to the ankle bracelet, a court found that Sarkozy and a former lawyer, Thierry Herzog, had formed a “corruption pact” with judge Gilbert Azibert to obtain and share information about an investigating judge.
The deal was done in return for the promise of a plum retirement job for the judge.
The trial came after investigators looking into a separate case of alleged illegal campaign financing wiretapped Sarkozy’s two official phone lines, and discovered that he had a third, unofficial one.
It had been taken out in 2014 under the name “Paul Bismuth”, and only used for him to communicate with Herzog. The contents of these phone calls led to the 2021 corruption verdict.
Before Sarkozy, the only French leader to be convicted in a criminal trial was his predecessor Jacques Chirac, who received a two-year suspended sentence in 2011 for corruption over a fake jobs scandal.
But Sarkozy is France’s first post-war president to be sentenced to serve time.
