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Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy will appear in court on Monday, accused of corruption and abuse of influence in a wiretapping scandal. The hearing is the first for the 65-year-old politician, who has faced several other court investigations since he left office in 2012, and Sarkozy is accused of trying to illegally obtain information from a judge about an investigation he participated in in 2014.
Sarkozy will appear in a Paris court with his lawyer Thierry Herzog, 65, and Judge Gilbert Aziber, 73, and the three face a possible sentence of up to 10 years in prison and a maximum fine of one million euros (1 $ 2 million), and they deny wrongdoing.
The hearings will be held until December 10. Sarkozy and Herzog are suspected of having promised Azeper a job in Monaco in exchange for leaking information about an investigation into alleged illegal funding of the 2007 presidential campaign by France’s richest woman, the L’Oreal heir, Liliane Bettencourt.
Sarkozy and Herzog used secret cell phones, registered under the pseudonym “Paul Bismuth”, in 2014 to allow them to have private conversations for fear of being intercepted, and Sarkozy and Herzog made it clear that they bought the phones to avoid being attacked by illegal wiretapping.
The investigating judges, however, suspect that they did so to avoid investigators, and the judges found that discussions between Sarkozy and his lawyer indicated that they were aware that judicial investigators at the time were listening to their conversations on their official phones. Sarkozy said he never stepped in to help Azepeire, who didn’t get the job and retired in 2014.
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