Sarkozy says no Libyan money went into winning 2007 campaign

PARIS: France’s ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy on Tuesday told an appeal trial there was “not a single cent of Libyan money” in the campaign that saw him elected in 2007.

The 71-year-old, who has always denied any wrongdoing, last year became modern France’s first former president to have gone to jail over the case.

“The truth is that there wasn’t a single cent of Libyan money in my campaign,” Sarkozy said.

A lower court in September found the right-wing politician, who was president from 2007 to 2012, guilty of seeking to acquire funding from Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya for the campaign, but did not rule that he received or used it for the campaign.

The court sentenced him to five years behind bars, 20 days of which he served before he was released pending the appeal.

In the initial trial, prosecutors had argued Sarkozy’s aides, acting in his name, struck a deal with Gaddafi, promising in return to help restore the Libyan leader’s international image after Tripoli was blamed for two plane bombings.

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.