Nicolas Sarkozy, together with Accor Group CEO Sébastien Bazin, at the Parc des Princes stadium, in the northern Paris suburbs, on January 11, 2023 JOHN SPENCER/SIPA
At 70, Nicolas Sarkozy discovered prison life on Tuesday, October 21. Before he began his detention at La Santé prison in Paris, the former French president was granted nearly a month to put his affairs in order. He had been sentenced to five years in prison on September 25 in the case of alleged Libyan funding for his 2007 presidential campaign. Despite the conviction, Sarkozy, who has since become a high-profile public speaker and consultant, will likely not see his business activities significantly disrupted by the court’s decision, which he has appealed.
His many clients – including Natixis, Axian, the tourism group Marietton and Compagnie Chargeurs Invest, which, in July, welcomed Sarkozy’s wife, Carla Bruni, to its board of directors – and the major publicly-traded groups (Lagardère, Accor) in which he serves as a board member have no intention of cutting ties with him. While his incarceration could ultimately be brief, if his request for release is granted by the appeals court within a two-month timeframe, his lawyer Christophe Ingrain emphasized that no “ban on managing” had been imposed on Sarkozy on September 25.
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