Sarkozy Sentenced: Former French President Jailed Over Gaddafi Funds

The Rotten Heart of Power: From Élysée Palace to Prison, Sarkozy Convicted in Gaddafi Corruption Case

Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy has been sentenced to five years in prison after being found guilty of criminal conspiracy in connection with millions of euros of illicit funds from the late Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.

The Paris criminal court acquitted him of other charges, including passive corruption and illegal campaign financing, but the guilty verdict still marks a historic humiliation: Sarkozy is now the first French president to face jail time for crimes committed in office. He has vowed to appeal but must begin serving his sentence in the meantime.

The 70-year-old, who governed France from 2007 to 2012, denounced the ruling as “extremely serious for the rule of law” and insisted the case is politically motivated. “If they absolutely want me to sleep in jail, I will sleep in jail, but with my head held high,” he told reporters outside court.

Prosecutors alleged that Sarkozy’s 2007 election campaign was bankrolled with €50 million (£43m) of Libyan money, funnelled through intermediaries in return for promises to rehabilitate Gaddafi’s standing in the West. Judge Nathalie Gavarino said Sarkozy had allowed close aides to seek Libyan support, though the court ruled there was insufficient proof he personally handled the funds.

Sarkozy was also ordered to pay a €100,000 fine. Gasps filled the courtroom as the sentence was read out.

The scandal traces back to 2011, when Saif al-Islam, Gaddafi’s son, first accused Sarkozy of taking Libyan cash. Lebanese businessman Ziad Takieddine later claimed to have written evidence showing Sarkozy’s campaign was “abundantly” financed by Tripoli, with payments continuing even after he entered the Élysée Palace.

Several senior officials were implicated: former interior ministers Claude Guéant and Brice Hortefeux were both convicted of corruption-related charges. Sarkozy’s wife, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, has also faced accusations of hiding evidence and colluding in fraud, which she denies.

This is only the latest in a string of convictions. In 2021, Sarkozy was found guilty of trying to bribe a judge. In 2024, he was sentenced for overspending on his failed 2012 re-election campaign and attempting to cover it up with a PR firm.

But the Gaddafi affair exposes more than Sarkozy’s personal corruption. It lays bare the hypocrisy of Western intervention in Libya. Even as Gaddafi’s regime was painted as a pariah and targeted for regime change in 2011, his oil money was being courted in the capitals of Europe. Sarkozy is accused of taking it to fuel his rise to power, only to later lead the NATO bombing campaign that left Libya shattered, its state dismantled, and the country plunged into chaos.

This is the rotten heart of modern Western politics: dictators embraced in private while denounced in public, their fortunes welcomed into campaign coffers until they outlive their usefulness. Sarkozy, once hailed as France’s answer to Tony Blair, the “moderniser” who would reshape the French right, has instead become the symbol of a political order built on duplicity, corruption, and blood-soaked deals.

John Pilger wrote: “In 2011, Obama told the media that the Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi was planning “genocide” against his own people. “We knew…,” he said, “that if we waited one more day, Benghazi, a city the size of Charlotte [North Carolina], could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world.”

This was a lie. The only “threat” was the coming defeat of fanatical Islamists by Libyan government forces. With his plans for a revival of independent pan-Africanism, an African bank and African currency, all of it funded by Libyan oil, Gaddafi was cast as an enemy of Western colonialism on the continent in which Libya was the second most modern state. 

Destroying Gaddafi’s “threat” and his modern state was the aim. Backed by the U.S., Britain and France, NATO launched 9,700 sorties against Libya. A third were aimed at infrastructure and civilian targets, reported the UN. Uranium warheads were used; the cities of Misurata and Sirte were carpet-bombed. The Red Cross identified mass graves, and Unicef reported that “most [of the children killed] were under the age of ten.”

When Hillary Clinton, Obama’s secretary of state, was told that Gaddafi had been captured by the insurrectionists and sodomised with a knife, she laughed and said to the camera: “We came, we saw, he died!” 

On 14 September 2016, the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee in London reported the conclusion of a year-long study into the NATO attack on Libya which it described as an “array of lies” — including the Benghazi massacre story.

The NATO bombing plunged Libya into a humanitarian disaster, killing thousands of people and displacing hundreds of thousands more, transforming Libya from the African country with the highest standard of living into a war-torn failed state.”

Nicolas Sarkozy’s downfall is not simply a personal disgrace. It is an indictment of a system where the same leaders who pocket money from autocrats are the first to demand bombs rain down on their countries.

Of course, David Cameron and the UK didn’t leave this campaign smelling of roses. London, too, had once welcomed Gaddafi back into polite company, remember Blair’s “deal in the desert”, before joining Sarkozy in the NATO bombardment that turned Libya into a failed state and a haven for traffickers and extremists. The West may like to present itself as the moral arbiter of the world, but the stench of hypocrisy still clings to every bomb crater in Tripoli.

Paul Knaggs

Editor, founder, Labour Heartlands, Citizen journalist. 𝙁𝙧𝙚𝙚𝙗𝙤𝙧𝙣 𝙀𝙣𝙜𝙡𝙞𝙨𝙝 𝙍𝙖𝙙𝙞𝙘𝙖𝙡 𝙎𝙤𝙘𝙞𝙖𝙡𝙞𝙨𝙩. Fighting a constant struggle with dyslexia that’s overcome with a burning desire to speak out against the corrupt political system and the social injustices it creates. Advocate for Free speech and open, accountable, democracy. #GTTO