PARIS, September 28. /TASS/. Ex-president of France Nicolas Sarkozi said in an interview with Le Journal du Dimanche that he did not expect the verdict of real imprisonment effective immediately.
"I was ready to everything but not to that, I should confess. Everything moved even farther than I could imagine; all the limits of law supremacy were breached. The National Office of Finance Prosecutor did not ask for that even in its toughest demands," the ex-head of state noted.
Sarkozy added that he did not understand the cause of applying the sentence without the deferral before the appeal review and the justification of this measure by the court as "the risk of public order violation" in case he remains out of prison. The politician stressed that the court did not find any deviations in his tax returns for the last twenty years and said that he was not going to flee from the country or to run for the presidential post again.
A Paris court sentenced Sarkozy, who was in office from 2007 to 2012, to five years in prison for accepting Libyan funds to finance his 2007 election campaign, BFMTV reported earlier, citing the court's decision.
The former president was also fined 100,000 euros. In addition, Sarkozy was also found guilty of participating in a criminal conspiracy but acquitted of charges of concealing the embezzlement of public funds and passive corruption. This means that the court did not establish the fact of illegal financing of the 2007 election campaign.
Information that former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi financed Sarkozy's campaign first emerged in March 2011 when Saif al-Islam, Gaddafi's son, said in an interview with Euronews that Libyan authorities were demanding the return of funds provided to Sarkozy. The Elysee Palace denied that the funds had been provided. Sarkozy had previously called these allegations ridiculous.