Photo: Reuters
Nicolas Sarkozy could face trial for corruption after France’s highest court ruled that potentially incriminating phone-taps between the former president and his lawyer were legally obtained.
The judgement in Paris yesterday could severely damage Mr Sarkozy’s chances of winning the conservative nomination and running for a second term as president in 2017.
The opposition leader is now under preliminary charges of corruption and influence peddling based on information gleaned from judicial phone taps in 2013 and 2014.
The allegations cover a catalogue of offences from the ‘illegal financing’ of his failed 2012 presidential campaign to accepting laundered money from the late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi and trying to bribe a senior judge.
Mr Sarkozy, married to former supermodel Carla Bruni, had tried to have the allegedly damning phone-tap evidence ruled out of court by arguing that the wiretapping was a breach of lawyer-client privilege.
But the Cour de Cassation ruled that the evidence could be admitted, clearing the way for a landmark trial that could end in a ten-year prison sentence.
Following the decision, his lawyer Patrice Spinosi said: ‘It's not just disappointment, it's incomprehension. The ruling is a defeat for the defence rights [and may] lead the European Court of Human Rights to sentence France over it.’
Reaction: Mr Sarkozy’s lawyer Patrice Spinosi (above) talked of his 'disappointment' and 'incomprehension'
Couple: Mr Sarkozy, married to former supermodel Carla Bruni, had tried to have the allegedly damning phone-tap evidence ruled out of court by arguing that the wiretapping was a breach of lawyer-client privilege
While his name has been mentioned in many legal cases since 2010, Mr Sarkozy has never been convicted of wrongdoing or been sent to trial.
And one glimmer of hope for his presidential ambitions rests in the fact that his main rival for his party’s nomination is Alain Juppe - himself a convicted criminal who in 2004 received a 14-month suspended sentence for misuse of public funds.
Mr Sarkozy’s predecessor as president Jacques Chirac is also a convicted criminal, who was handed a two-year suspended prison sentence in 2011 for diverting public funds, abuse of trust and illegal conflict of interest during his time as mayor of Paris from 1977 to 1995.
Chirac was the first former French head of state to be convicted since Marshal Philippe Petain, the leader of the wartime Vichy regime, was found guilty in 1945 of collaborating with the Nazis.
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