French prosecutors on Wednesday urged judges to send former President Nicolas Sarkozy back to prison, seeking a seven-year term and a 300,000-euro fine as the appeal unfolded in the so-called Libya case. The prosecutors asked the court to find Sarkozy guilty again — this time on corruption and campaign-financing allegations they said were improperly cleared when he was first tried in connection with alleged secret funding linked to late Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi.
Sarkozy, 71, has been at the center of multiple corruption proceedings in recent years, but the Libya case carries what prosecutors and legal observers describe as its heaviest political and symbolic weight. The case alleges that a foreign dictatorship secretly funded Sarkozy’s successful 2007 presidential campaign, a claim that prosecutors say goes beyond administrative or accounting issues and strikes at the legitimacy of a French election.
The request was made to the three judges hearing the appeal, which is set to run until early June, with a verdict expected on Nov. 30. Prosecutors also asked the court to impose a five-year ban on Sarkozy from holding public office, though the three judges are not bound by prosecutors’ sentencing and legal requests.
Sarkozy was sentenced in September 2025 to five years for criminal conspiracy, becoming the first former French president in modern history to be imprisoned. He served 20 days at Paris’ La Santé prison before being released in November under court supervision, and he appealed that conviction; prosecutors then followed with their own appeal seeking to revive charges they said Sarkozy had beaten at his first trial.
In the Libya case appeal, prosecutors asked the three judges to convict Sarkozy of three categories of conduct: corruption, illegal campaign financing, and concealing the embezzlement of Libyan public funds. Prosecutors said they should also convict him in a way that would go further than the first trial’s outcome, when judges cleared him of corruption on technical grounds, ruling that as a presidential candidate he lacked the “public authority” status required by France’s anti-corruption law.
After the Wednesday hearing, Sarkozy’s lawyer Christophe Ingrain told reporters that the prosecutors’ request was “strictly identical” to the position financial prosecutors had taken without success in the first trial. Ingrain added: “There is no Libyan money in his campaign, in his estate,” and said, “Nicolas Sarkozy is innocent, and we will demonstrate it in fifteen days.”
Alongside Sarkozy, other members of his inner circle face charges in the Libya case, including former chief of staff Claude Guéant, former Interior Minister Brice Hortefeux, longtime Sarkozy fixer Alexandre Djouhri, and the 2007 campaign treasurer Éric Woerth. Prosecutors have sought sentences ranging from 10 months to six years for those defendants and fines between 3,000 euros and 4 million euros, according to the request presented during the appeal process.
The appeal also includes questions around who could not be reached for trial. Prosecutors asked for an international arrest warrant against Beshir Saleh, described as once head of Gadhafi’s cabinet, who has lived in exile since the Libyan regime fell in 2011 and did not appear at either trial.
The case’s allegations date to 2011, when the notion of Libyan financing first surfaced. Investigators later established that some 6 million euros were transferred from Libya into accounts controlled by Ziad Takieddine, a go-between who died last September, days before the original verdict. Prosecutors said the heart of the case involves two secret meetings in late 2005 involving Guéant, Hortefeux and Abdallah Senoussi — described by prosecutors as Gadhafi’s brother-in-law and intelligence chief.
Senoussi has been sentenced in absentia by a French court in 1999 to life in prison for ordering the 1989 bombing of UTA Flight 772 over Niger, which killed 170 people, including 54 French nationals. Prosecutors argue that Sarkozy’s camp promised to look into Senoussi’s conviction in exchange for campaign money, an account Sarkozy has rejected, including by questioning why he would select a leader he had never met before as part of a suspicious financing arrangement.
At the first trial, judges cleared Sarkozy of corruption charges on technical grounds, but he was convicted in other cases that are now final. France’s top court upheld in November a conviction linked to financing for his failed 2012 re-election bid, known as the Bygmalion affair, for which he received a one-year sentence. A French judge last week ruled that Sarkozy could serve a six-month sentence on conditional release rather than an electronic ankle tag, though that ruling was described as not yet final, and he was also convicted of illegally wiretapping a judge.
Defense lawyers are due to begin closing arguments in two weeks, and the three judges are expected to decide whether prosecutors’ broader push — including overturning the earlier technical clearance — should result in the harsher outcome sought for Sarkozy in the Libya case.