Nicolas Sarkozy becomes the first former president in France to appear before a judge on charges of corruption

Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy appeared today before the judge in the first hearing of his trial on charges of corruption. Sarkozy became the first former president in France to appear in court on this charge.

Sarkozy, who was president of France between 2007 and 2012, is accused of attempting to bribe a judge to leak information about a financial investigation against his party.

Sarkozy denies the allegations.

Lawyers for the 73-year-old retired judge, who allegedly offered a bribe, said their clients’ health was not suitable for attending the hearing.

Sarkozy denied the allegations for six years and struggled not to turn into a case.

The process is expected to continue until 10 December.

Jacques Chirac, another former president of France, was convicted of embezzlement in 2011.

Chirac was sentenced to two years in prison in 2011 on charges of hijacking public funds and abuse of public trust and did not appear before a judge due to his poor health.

There are many files prepared by the French prosecutors against Sarkozy.

The trial, which will officially begin today, will deal with Sarkozy’s corruption allegations in the run up to the election campaign.

The case is linked to an investigation into Sarkozy’s allegations of secret donations in the run-up to the 2007 election.

The prosecutor accused Sarkozy and his then lawyer Thierry Herzog of offering Judge Gilbert Azibert a prestigious post in Munich in exchange for information on this investigation.

As part of the survey, Sarkozy and Thierry Herzog’s telephone conversations between 2013 and 2014 were heard.

Sarkozy, on the other hand, denies the allegations, citing evidence that Azibert was never named to this post in Munich.

There are other cases of corruption against Sarkozy that have not yet turned into a lawsuit.

The former president’s accusation of accepting illegal donations from Liliane Bettencourt, the heir to cosmetics company L’Oreal for the 2007 elections, was dropped by the judges in October 2013.

Furthermore, prosecutors say Sarkozy received millions of euros in donations from Libya in 2007, when Muammar Gaddafi was in charge of the same election campaign.

In 2018, Sarkozy was charged with corruption, illegal campaign financing, and misappropriation of public funds.

Last month he was accused of being part of a criminal conspiracy.

Sarkozy denies all these accusations.

As part of another lawsuit, he will appear in court in 2021, this time with 13 other defendants, for violating financial rules during the 2012 presidential election campaign.

In this case, prosecutors accuse Sarkozy’s campaign group of spending around 43 million euros on massive fraud run by public relations firm Bygmalion. This is almost double the amount of campaign funding allowed by law.

Corruption investigations against him resulted in Sarkozy not being able to run for the 2017 presidential election.

But since 2018, when he announced his retirement from politics, he has attracted the attention of the public, like all former French presidents. Crowds surround him wherever he goes.

Finally, queues formed during the autograph days he arranged for his memoir “Time of Storms”, which he released this summer, and the book has been on the “bestseller” list for weeks.