PARIS, France (CNN) – Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy was found guilty on Thursday of illegal campaign financing in his failed 2012 re-election bid.
The criminal investigation – which began in March 2014 – into what has been dubbed the “Bygmalion case,” discovered that Nicolas Sarkozy’s 2012 re-election campaign spent more than $54 million by using a system of fake invoices, way above the limit of $24 million set by French electoral laws.
Sarkozy fought a lengthy legal battle trying to prevent the trial from happening, but his appeal was rejected in late 2018 and the trial opened on May 20, 2021, after having been delayed for two months due to a key defendant’s lawyer being hospitalized for COVID-19.
The spending limit was a well-known fact within Sarkozy’s campaign team. On March 7, 2012, they received their first memo from their accountants warning them of the quickly expanding campaign cost, urging them to “correct the trajectory,” said Guillaume Lambert, Sarkozy’s 2012 campaign manager, in an interview with France 2 television earlier this year.
Lambert said he told Sarkozy about the memo and indicated to him the necessity to cut campaign spending, while Sarkozy maintained that he had no knowledge of the overspending.
Sarkozy’s legal woes are not over yet as French prosecutors are looking into alleged illegal campaign funding from Libya. Libya’s former deceased leader Muammar Gadhafi allegedly provided Sarkozy’s 2007 campaign with millions of euros shipped to Paris in suitcases.
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