The Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy has been sentenced to three years in jail for corruption.
According to BBC News, Sarkozy, who is 66 years of age, was found guilty of trying to bribe a magistrate by offering a prestigious job in Monaco in return for information about a criminal inquiry into his political party.
The crimes were specified as influence-peddling and violation of professional secrecy.
The magistrate named Gilbert Azibert, and Sarkozy’s former lawyer, Thierry Herzog, also got the same sentence.
The case which the former president tried to cover centred on conversations between Azibert and Herzog, which were taped by investigators looking into claims that Sarkozy accepted illicit payments from the L’Oreal heiress Liliane Bettencourt for his 2007 presidential campaign.
The phone line they tapped was a secret number set up in a fictional name, Paul Bismuth, through which Sarkozy communicated with his lawyer.
In the ruling, the judge in Paris said Sarkozy could serve a year at home with an electronic tag, rather than go to prison. However, the ex-president is expected to appeal.
Sarkozy “knew what [he] was doing was wrong”, the judge said, adding that his actions and those of Herzog had given the public “a very bad image of justice”.
Sarkozy is also due to go on trial in a separate case, from 17 March to 15 April, which relates to the so-called Bygmalion affair. He is accused of having fraudulently overspent in his 2012 presidential campaign which was unsuccessful.
Despite his legal entanglements Sarkozy has remained popular in right-wing circles, a year away from a presidential election.
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