“Nicolas Sarkozy knew the spending limit,” the judge said. “He knew he shouldn’t exceed it.”
This is the second criminal case involving Sarkozy. In March he was handed a three-year prison sentence, two of which were suspended, for corruption and influence peddling. The 66-year-old has appealed the March conviction.
First started in March 2014, the criminal investigation into what has been dubbed the “Bygmalion case,” discovered that his campaign spent more than $54 million during the campaign by using 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 legal ceiling for campaign funds 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.