Prosecutors in the case said Sarkozy’s UMP party spent nearly double the \u20ac22.5m (\u00a319.4m) cap on his campaign, splurging on lavish campaign rallies and events.<\/p>\n
To hide the costs, UMP then asked Bygmalion to invoice the party, rather than the campaign.<\/p>\n
Today’s is the second definitive conviction for the former president, who was in power from 2007 to 2012.<\/p>\n
Last December the High Court of Appeal upheld a corruption conviction and Sarkozy had to wear an electronic monitoring bracelet for six months.<\/p>\n
Then, in September, he was sentenced to five years in jail after being found guilty of criminal conspiracy.<\/p>\n
He spent 20 days in jail before he was released earlier in November. <\/p>\n
An appeal trial will be held next year. Until then Sarkozy will be subject to strict judicial supervision and barred from leaving France.<\/p>\n
Days after his release, Sarkozy’s team announced the former president was writing a book about his three weeks in jail, titled “A prisoner’s diary”. <\/p>\n
An excerpt from the book was published on social media: “In prison there is nothing to see, and nothing to do. I forget the silence that does not exist at La Sant\u00e9 [prison], where there is much to listen to. Here, the noise is, unfortunately, constant. But – like in the desert – inner life strengthens in jail.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Prosecutors in the case said Sarkozy’s UMP party spent nearly double the \u20ac22.5m (\u00a319.4m) cap on his campaign,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":596322,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[12,26],"class_list":{"0":"post-596321","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world","8":"tag-news","9":"tag-world"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115619498831868561","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/596321","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=596321"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/596321\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/596322"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=596321"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=596321"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=596321"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}