On Wednesday, 26 November 2025, the Court of Cassation, the highest court in the French judicial system, rejected Nicolas Sarkozy’s appeal in the Bygmalion case. This decision makes the sentence final: in February 2024, the Paris Court of Appeal sentenced the former president to one year in prison, six months of which is actual imprisonment, to be served with the possibility of amnesty via electronic tagging.
The investigation revealed that the officially declared budget for Sarkozy’s 2012 election campaign (a maximum of €22.5 million) was in fact almost double that amount, at around €43 million. To conceal the overspending, some of the expenses for the election campaign were recorded as invoices issued not to the campaign, but to the then UMP party (later Les Républicains). The court ruled that regardless of whether Sarkozy himself was aware of the details of the fraud, his status as a candidate made him responsible for the illegal financing.
This is his second final conviction after the verdict in the ‘wiretapping’ case (the so-called Affaire Bismuth), where Sarkozy already received a sentence of house arrest with an electronic tag. Now that the Bygmalion case is finally closed, Sarkozy remains under threat of new criminal proceedings: an appeal is expected in spring 2026 in the case of alleged illegal financing of his 2007 campaign from Libya.
The former president’s lawyers have already stated that they ‘take note’ of the court’s decision. At the same time, they do not rule out appealing to the European Court of Human Rights. They believe that the defendant’s rights may have been violated in the sentencing.
