Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy lost his appeal against a three-year sentence in a corruption case. It was assigned to him in 2021. Sarkozy was sentenced to two years of probation and one year of real imprisonment. The court allowed him to serve a year not in prison, but at home, with an electronic bracelet.
In March 2021, a court in France found Sarkozy guilty in the so-called "wiretapping case". The investigation claims that in 2014 he tried to bribe the judge of the Court of Cassation, Gilbert Aziber. The former French president expected to receive confidential information about the investigation into the illegal financing of his 2007 election campaign. Then Sarkozy, who ran for the presidency of France, was suspected of receiving more than €100 thousand from the daughter of the founder of the cosmetics company L'Oreal Liliane Bettencourt. This became known from wiretapping of his telephone conversations – hence the name of the case. The campaign bribery case was closed in 2013.
Sarkozy is the second convicted French president. The first was his predecessor, the late Jacques Chirac. In 2011, he was sentenced to two years' probation after being found guilty of abuse of office, illegal profit-making and embezzlement from 1990-1995, when he was mayor of Paris.
