PARIS (Reuters) – Claude Guéant and Patrick Buisson were sentenced on Friday to eight months in prison respectively for favoritism and two years in prison suspended for embezzlement of public funds at the end of the trial of the “Elysée polls”, opinion polls awarded without a call for tenders under the presidency of Nicolas Sarkozy, according to the judgment of the 32nd correctional chamber of the Paris court.
Two other relatives of the former head of state – former pollster Pierre Giacometti and former cabinet director Emmanuelle Mignon – were convicted in this case of irregular awarding of public contracts from 2007 to 2012, which cost more than seven million euros to the State – and therefore to taxpayers.
Pierre Giacometti is sentenced to six months in prison suspended (and 70,000 euros fine), as well as Emmanuelle Mignon, without fine. The latter’s lawyers denounced in a press release “an unjust decision which sanctions the first person to have introduced public procurement at the Elysée.”
Nicolas Sarkozy himself was not prosecuted because he enjoys presidential criminal immunity. The court had nevertheless imposed on him to appear as a witness during the trial which was held in October and November, but he had refused to answer questions from the judges on November 2, citing the principle of separation of powers.
The Elysée had commissioned 264 opinion polls between June 2007 and July 2009, some of which had little to do with the conduct of the state, such as the one aimed at knowing the opinion of the French on the couple formed by Nicolas Sarkozy with singer Carla Bruni.
The trial was held after a long procedural battle after the first complaint against X filed by the anti-corruption association Anticor in 2010, the Court of Cassation having finally ruled that the criminal irresponsibility enjoyed by the president of the Republic did not apply to his cabinet.
Incarcerated since December after the revocation of part of his suspended prison sentence in another case, the former secretary general of the Elysée Palace Claude Guéant, considered Nicolas Sarkozy’s “right arm”, was found guilty of “favoritism” and received a year in prison, including four months suspended. The prosecution had requested a year in prison.
A deferred deposit mandate has been issued for Claude Guéant, who is 77 years old.
The former interior minister has decided to appeal his conviction, according to his lawyer.
The former strategic adviser to the Head of State, Patrick Buisson, a historian from the National Front who had been the great architect of the “right-winging” of his campaign, was sentenced to a two-year suspended prison sentence for ” embezzlement of public funds” for an estimated amount of 1.4 million euros. He will also have to pay a fine of 150,000 euros.
By trampling on the rules at a time when France was suffering from serious public deficits due to the financial crisis, the defendants “discredited the presidency of the French Republic”, declared the president of the court during the reading of the deliberations.
(Tangi Salaün, edited by Sophie Louet)