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PARIS (AFP) — French prosecutors on Wednesday requested a seven-year prison sentence for former President Nicolas Sarkozy in an appeal trial on charges that he sought Libyan financing for his 2007 election.
Sarkozy, France’s right-wing leader from 2007 to 2012, has always denied any wrongdoing but last year became modern France’s first former president to have gone to jail over the case, before he was released after 20 days pending his appeal trial.
Prosecutors had also requested seven years in the first trial over seeking to acquire funding from Moammar Gadhafi’s Libya for the campaign, as well as corruption, illegal campaign financing and receiving misappropriated Libyan public funds.
A lower court sentenced him to five years only, over seeking to acquire the funding, but acquitted him of the three other charges.
In the latest trial, prosecutors called the former president the “instigator” of the alleged pact to receive funding to boost his campaign in exchange for help to restore the Libyan leader’s international image after Tripoli was blamed for two plane bombings.
Sarkozy told the court there was “not a single cent of Libyan money” in the campaign that saw him elected in 2007.
A decision is expected on Nov. 30.
If convicted, Sarkozy could then appeal to France’s highest court.
In the initial trial, prosecutors had argued Sarkozy’s aides, acting in his name, struck a deal with Gaddafi to help people rehabilitate his global reputation.
The West laid the blame on Libya for the bombing of the Pan Am Flight 103 in 1988 over Lockerbie in Scotland — which killed 259 people — and of the UTA Flight 772 over Niger the following year, which took the lives of 170 people.
Sarkozy, 71, has faced a raft of accusations since leaving office, all of which he has denied.
He has received two definitive convictions in other cases — linked to overspending in his failed 2012 re-election bid and later trying to extract favors from a judge.
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By ALEXANDRE MARCHAND and NICOLAS GAUDICHET, Agence France-Presse
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