Rabat – Nicolas Sarkozy is once again set to wear an electronic ankle bracelet after France’s highest court upheld his conviction in the Bygmalion campaign financing case.
In a ruling issued today, the Court of Cassation confirmed the sentence imposed by the lower court, bringing an end to his final appeal in the French judicial system.
In response, the former president said he “takes note” of the decision, while his legal team announced it is considering turning to the European Court of Human Rights.
The ruling comes only weeks after Sarkozy completed a twenty-day prison term related to another case involving allegations of Libyan funding for his 2007 presidential bid.
During the cassation proceedings in the Bygmalion affair, his sentence had been temporarily suspended, pushing the case out of the public eye as attention turned to his incarceration in Paris’s La Santé prison.
At the heart of the Bygmalion case lies the concealment of extensive overspending during Sarkozy’s 2012 re-election campaign.
Investigators determined that expenses had far exceeded the legally permitted ceiling, with nearly €43 million spent in a race capped at €22.5 million.
To obscure the overrun, a system of double invoicing was put in place, allowing a significant share of costly campaign events to be billed to the UMP party, now called The Republicans, under fictitious agreements.
Sarkozy was not prosecuted as an architect of that system. Instead, the courts found him responsible as the primary beneficiary of illegal campaign financing.
Throughout the legal process, he has firmly rejected the allegations, maintaining that he had no criminal involvement and denouncing the accusations as baseless.
On appeal, his sentence was slightly reduced from the initial one-year prison term delivered in 2021, with the court opting for an adapted form of detention, including electronic surveillance.
Several co-defendants, including his former campaign director and two senior figures from the UMP, also attempted to overturn their convictions through an appeal to the Court of Cassation, but their efforts were rejected as well.
This will not be Sarkozy’s first experience with an electronic monitoring device. He was placed under such supervision following a final conviction in the wiretapping case known as “Bismuth” in December 2024.
He appeared in court wearing the device earlier this year during proceedings in the Libyan financing case, which led to a five-year prison sentence handed down in September.
An appeal in that separate case is scheduled to open in March 2026, and Sarkozy is expected to remain under electronic surveillance until then.
In a statement issued after today’s ruling, his lawyers reiterated that the Court of Appeal itself had acknowledged that Sarkozy was unaware of the excessive spending tied to the 2012 campaign.
Nevertheless, they argued, the Court of Cassation ruled that his status as a presidential candidate alone was sufficient to establish criminal liability, a position they described as unprecedented in French jurisprudence.
