French prosecutors on Wednesday asked an appeals court in Paris to return former President Nicolas Sarkozy to prison for seven years, the latest escalation in a sprawling case that alleges the late Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi secretly bankrolled Sarkozy’s successful 2007 presidential bid. The request, delivered during the ongoing appeal hearing, renews the most politically and symbolically consequential prosecution the 71-year-old former head of state has faced.
The prosecution asked the three-judge panel to find Sarkozy guilty of corruption, illegal campaign financing, and concealing the embezzlement of Libyan public funds — three charges on which he was acquitted at his original trial. A separate request would bar him from holding public office for five years if convicted.
Sarkozy’s lawyer, Christophe Ingrain, told reporters after Wednesday’s session that the prosecution’s argument was “strictly identical” to what financial prosecutors had unsuccessfully sought at the first trial. “There is no Libyan money in his campaign, in his estate,” Ingrain said. “Nicolas Sarkozy is innocent, and we will demonstrate it in fifteen days.”
Sarkozy was sentenced in September 2025 to five years for criminal conspiracy, making him the first former French president in modern history to be imprisoned. He served 20 days in Paris’s La Santé prison before being released in November under court supervision. He appealed that conviction; prosecutors followed, seeking to revive the charges he beat at trial and to impose a longer sentence.
The Libya case centers on allegations that first surfaced in 2011. French investigators later determined that roughly 6 million euros ($7 million) were transferred from Libyan accounts into accounts controlled by Ziad Takieddine, a go-between who died in September 2025, days before the original verdict.
At the heart of the case are two secret meetings in late 2005 between Sarkozy’s then-chief of staff Claude Guéant, former Interior Minister Brice Hortefeux, and Abdallah Senoussi — Gadhafi’s brother-in-law and intelligence chief. Senoussi had 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 say Sarkozy’s camp promised to look into Senoussi’s French conviction in exchange for campaign money.
“Why would I have chosen Mr. Gadhafi, whom I had never met before, to set up a suspicious financing arrangement with him during a 30-minute meeting?” Sarkozy asked the judges at the appeal hearing in April. “It makes no sense.” He added, “I owe the truth to the French people. I’m innocent.”
Prosecutors this week called Sarkozy the “instigator” of the alleged corruption deal, a characterization that goes further than the first trial, where judges found him guilty only of letting his aides approach the Libyan regime on his behalf. The first court cleared him of the corruption charge on technical grounds, ruling that as a presidential candidate he lacked the “public authority” status required by France’s anti-corruption law.
The appeal also involves several members of Sarkozy’s inner circle. Prosecutors sought sentences ranging from 10 months to six years and fines between 3,000 and 4 million euros ($3,500 to $4.68 million) for Guéant, Hortefeux, longtime Sarkozy fixer Alexandre Djouhri, and 2007 campaign treasurer Éric Woerth. The prosecution also requested an international arrest warrant for Beshir Saleh, once head of Gadhafi’s cabinet, who has lived in exile since the Libyan regime fell in 2011 and never appeared at either trial.
Sarkozy has already been convicted in two other cases that are now final. France’s top court upheld his conviction in November over the financing of his failed 2012 reelection bid, known as the Bygmalion affair, for which he received a one-year sentence — six months firm and six months suspended. A French judge ruled last week that he could serve that six-month term on conditional release rather than wearing an electronic ankle bracelet, citing his age, though that ruling is not yet final. He was also previously convicted of illegally wiretapping a judge.
The appeal hearing runs until early June. Defense lawyers are scheduled to begin their closing arguments in roughly two weeks. The three judges are not bound by the prosecution’s sentencing request, and a verdict is expected on November 30.